How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Lord V
by cheryl bites
Summary: Nuclear war breaks out and Voldemort casts a spell to stop time. He and Harry alone are left to defuse the missiles and prevent the war. Voldemort’s radiophobic. Oh joy. LVHP. Spoilers for HBP, none for DH.
1. Uh Oh, This Is Going To Be Some Day

**How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Lord Voldemort**

**Chapter 1: Uh-Oh, This Is Going To Be Some Day**

(_Author's note: _The details of nuclear physics, warfare, etc., presented in this story are not intended to be especially accurate.)

It was the third day, and I had given up trying; the third day after Dumbledore's funeral should have taken place, and hadn't. I'd found nothing that could alter what had happened, nothing to explain why everyone and everything in the world had frozen between one breath and the next. The sun remained fixed at eternal morning, the ripples on the lake were immobile; I had found the centaurs stopped in mid-hunt in the Forbidden Forest, the Muggles mid-shop in Dufftown. I cast Specialis Revealo and the answer came from the atmosphere at large, restating in a different language what I already knew: _Tempus Stabat._

"Why is tempus stabatting?" I asked the silent castle. "Why?" but there was no answer.

I had eaten my way through a good portion of the food that lay, permanently fresh, under the knives of the motionless house-elves in the kitchens; I had discovered that the toilets wouldn't properly flush, and that the only solution was to go round the castle using each one in turn; I had found that getting a good night's sleep in mid-morning sunshine was very difficult, but I hadn't found any explanation of what was happening. All right, someone had cast a spell to stop time; but it hadn't stopped me.

So, the third day, and I had lost my resistance to the agony of waving my hand in front of people's faces and seeing their total lack of response. During the first hours I had gone round the castle approaching everyone I could think of, McGonagall and Slughorn and anyone with any degree of authority or knowledge; I had shaken them and prodded them and shouted, but nothing had happened. So, as I say, I had stopped doing that. I was curled up at Ginny's feet where she sat preserved in the middle of eating breakfast; not moving or speaking, and trying my best not to exist at all, just to wait until all this was over, one way or the other.

And it was over; I heard the front door bang.

000

Walking matter-of-factly down the hallway, robes swishing briskly, was Voldemort.

I was too distracted by the sudden, excruciating pain in my scar to form a proper plan. Pulling my wand out, pointing it at him with a wildly shaking hand, I said in a voice that was half a scream, "DID YOU DO THIS?!"

He seemed only very mildly surprised to see me. He Disarmed me without a word, and I ran maniacally towards him with the intention of throttling him with my bare hands; but he Petrified me and, to my dismay, I found myself frozen to the spot like everyone else in Hogwarts. I thought, "That's it, he's going to leave me here, a statue, like everyone else. I'll be here forever." The horror was unspeakable.

Then he played an irritable little tune by rapping our wands together, and said "When you've quite finished trying to kill me, Potter, we have a world to save. Is there anyone else still animate here, apart from you?"

He cast the partial Body-Bind, freeing my head and shoulders to let me answer, but all I managed was an ear-blasting, window-shattering scream. Voldemort quickly put the full Bind back on again.

"It's easier to read your mind, boy. Not to mention quieter... Nobody here apart from you, I see. Why you should have resisted the stasis spell, I have no idea. Either you're benefiting from the link we share, or I must have underestimated you significantly. Not that it really matters..."

He conjured up a high-backed chair and sat down. "I don't want you to start screeching at me again, so I'd better explain what's happening. More or less the entire world... the planet, if you like, is under a Temporal Stasis spell. I cast it in advance, many years ago, to stop time. I set it to activate automatically in the event of a nuclear war. That war has now started. The command has been given to fire the missiles."

He started tapping our wands against his leg, as though marking time to an inaudible tune.

"As you can see, a nuclear war would be somewhat... inadvisable," he said slowly. "And only wizards and witches of great power have been able to ignore the stasis spell and move at normal speed. Actually, I haven't found any others, not so far. So the two of us now have the enviable task of locating all the British warheads and deactivating them. That shouldn't be too bad because, comparatively speaking, there's hardly any of them. What bothers me is the possibility that the Russian and North American wizards have been caught by the spell, in which case we'll have to do it all ourselves. If that _is_ the case we might as well just AK ourselves in the heads right now," he said in an almost inaudible voice, adding a very scary small smile.

"Do you get the point now?" he finished suddenly, looking up at me. "I will unParalyse you, but you must not try to kill me. Or Stun me or Petrify me or attack me in any way. I would also appreciate it if you didn't scream."

He removed it, and I stood for quite some time with my mouth just hanging open, tears parenthesising my nose as I battled the pain in my scar. Finally I said, "You could be lying about the nuclear war."

He gave a horrible, mirthless laugh, followed by a hideously cheery grin. "I'll prove it to you, shall I, dear child? I'll remove the temporal stasis spell (well, actually there are technical difficulties with that anyway, but...), and the entire habitable environment can be completely obliterated, and I'll sit back and say, 'There! I told you so.' Why are you crying?"

I managed to gasp out, "Fucking hurts."

"What does?" he said impatiently, and cast some kind of anaesthetic spell before I could answer. Blue, tingling magic fizzed down the front of my face; blessed relief. I made my eyes point in the same direction and tried to get my thoughts to do likewise.

"This could just be some plan to get me away from Hogwarts and kill me."

Voldemort did an insane little dance of frustration in which he swooped round with his arms aloft. I watched in nauseated astonishment. "A, there is a _nuclear war on_, and B, why on earth would I _cast a temporal stasis spell _just to get you away from Hogwarts?!"

"Because you want to kill me!"

He stopped his dance and gave a hoot of strangled laughter. "Fuck me, boy, I don't want to kill you _that_ much!"

"Is it a difficult spell to cast?" I said doubtfully, privately thinking that he must be telling the truth just because he was being so weird, and that anyway I had no choice but to go with him for the moment, because if I stayed here any longer I would completely loop the loop.

"It took me most of 1956," he said sombrely. "Even I encountered great problems. I began to think I wouldn't get it done in time."

I exhaled uncertainly. "All right," I said, "so we have to defuse nuclear bombs? What good am I supposed to be?"

"You can help me, boy."

"I'm only sixteen."

Glare. "What's that got to do with anything, fool?"

"I don't know about nuclear bombs," I said impatiently, "and I'm not powerful enough magically to do much else, either."

"You are obviously powerful enough or you wouldn't have resisted the stasis spell, not to mention having escaped death by my hand five times," he hissed with a look of tremendous hatred at my having made him admit it. "And I know perfectly well you're no nuclear physicist, what I need is an assistant and general dogsbody. If you don't feel up to that, you can just stay here."

As if that was any sort of a choice. I said, "Where are we going?"

000

Where we went first was a supermarket, in which Voldemort browsed the aisles with an indifferent expression, placing cabbage and beetroot in his trolley as though this were perfectly normal for Dark Lords. As soon as I saw the beetroot I decided I would be better off cooking my own meal. I gathered everything I needed for a full English breakfast, and wandered back to the front of the shop to find that Voldie had summoned a Primus stove and was indeed making borscht.

"Are we going to Russia?" I said curiously.

"Here's a stove for you," he said indifferently, conjuring a twin Primus and a frying pan. "Don't disturb me while I'm making plans."

Suited me fine. "I'll be in the sanitary towels section," I said, and trundled off to the other end of the supermarket. While I cooked my meal I had to ponder all sorts of odd factors, such as: Where was the steam going? Why didn't the smoke alarm go off and activate the sprinkler system? How come things we had touched defied the stasis spell, but only briefly? And, What does this pump thing on the Primus do? Ultimately, though, I was totally satisfied with my cookery, and ate it with relish.

I trundled over to the newspaper section and was deeply disappointed by the vast array of tits. The broadsheets seemed worried about the situation in the Middle East, but I had thought that for just _one _cataclysm the tabloids might have had the grace to put something else on the cover. Oh well. I returned to the aisles, which contained a small number of desultory shoppers. They didn't look the least bit worried about the end of the world; did they not know it was happening? My ignorance, I realised, was astounding. I wandered back to Voldemort, who was stirring his borscht, and said "How come the sirens aren't sounding?"

"Possibly because (a) the missiles haven't left their launching pads yet and (b) the siren system was dismantled at the end of the Cold War," Voldie said.

Fair enough. "Have you finished making plans yet?"

"No," he said dully, "because there isn't really any plan to make. We find the warheads and, I suppose, Vanish them. I don't know if you can come up with anything better?"

He seemed serious. I thought the question over. It was odd talking to him like this; he was like a different person, a grey cardboard man, and we were trying to save the world. I said, "I wish."

He frowned at the stove. "Vanishing things sends them to a pocket universe from which they can theoretically be brought back. That's not really what we want, although it's better than nothing. I suppose one way of getting rid of them would be to send them to the pocket universe and then detonate them."

"Bit shit for the pocket universe," I said.

"I was thinking that. We don't know what's in there. It could be another inhabited planet for all we know; which would still dispose of the bombs, but... and I'm worried that the walls won't hold and the blast will leak back here," he added, which he plainly considered to be far more important.

I had a feeling there was something I'd missed here, because it seemed to me that bombs ought to have detonators; or, in the case of those round black things in cartoons, a long piece of string with the end on fire. If that was the case then surely all we needed to do was separate the bomb from the detonator? I said as much to Voldemort and was rewarded with a glare. His red eyes looked particularly strange under the strip lights.

"Go and read a magazine or something," he said shortly, and started eating his borscht.

000

"Where _are _we going?" I asked for the second time as he extended a black-robed arm and pinned me to his chest with a grip of steel. I knew we had to use Side-Along Apparition, but being touched by him made me shudder.

"Lakenheath," came the supremely illuminating reply, and off we went down the rubber hose; and even had he bothered to say "The American Air Base in Surrey," I would still have been utterly confused by my arrival in what looked like any old field, albeit with a massive great road down the middle. While I was staggering in drunken circles and trying to compose myself, he looked up and down the road, shook his head, grabbed me and Disapparated again.

"Could you stop Apparating every five seconds?" I demanded, reeling from the impact and sitting down hard.

"The runway is two miles long," he said tersely. "D'you expect me to just walk down it?"

"What runway?" I demanded, just as he grabbed me and Disapparated for the third time and I finally saw what he was on about, because in front of us was a spiky, bizarrely streamlined aeroplane about as high as a house and three times as long. A tiny, frozen bloke was visible inside a bubble on top.

"Fuck me," I said, sitting down again.

"That's one of them," said Voldie in great triumph. "For a moment I was thinking we'd missed them all. And still with the bombs in the bay," and for absolutely no apparent reason he suddenly Petrified me wordlessly.

I couldn't see what Voldie was doing very clearly. I stayed locked in position and looked round at some very pretty Southern countryside with fields and deciduous woods. The ground was rather wet. Then out of the corner of my eye I saw his wand moving, drawing a complex, glowing pattern in mid-air; a rather oddly-shaped pattern, really. I squinted painfully sideways and saw that the lines were very wiggly, which turned out to be because his hand was shaking.

"Dammit," he said. "I just can't..."

He erased the wiggly lines and drew new ones, and finally managed a pattern that seemed to satisfy him; he finished the spell non-verbally, and the whole of one side of the aeroplane suddenly disappeared. I presumed he'd made it invisible. Just while I was being fascinated by how little space there was inside, he unPetrified me.

"What did you Petrify me for?" I said indignantly, jumping up.

"To stop you going near the aircraft, disrupting the temporal stasis spell and making something terrible happen," he said, rolling his eyes.

"Yeah, like I would!"

"Oh, very likely! You're a Gryffindor! Take one step towards that plane and I'll do it again."

I stood and looked up at the half-plane. It had a small pregnant belly, inside which were several long, white chimneys with little wings.

"Is that the bombs?" I said, making Voldemort flinch.

"Yes, they are," he said harshly. "Now _be quiet_."

He raised his wand and pointed it at the plane. Then he took a gasping breath and lowered it again. After a moment he tried again, but his whole arm was shaking. I could see his elbow wobbling from side to side.

I began to feel worried. Whatever it was that was affecting him, it seemed obvious that this spell had the potential to go alarmingly wrong. Like he might detonate the warheads, kill us both and destroy the world, for starters. "Let me hold your hand," I said quietly, very keen that he should not jump.

"Piss off, Potter," he snapped, still shaking.

"I don't want you to miss."

I gently put my left arm round his stomach; then I wrapped my right hand around his bony wrist. (By 1997 I was only about a foot shorter than him.) I was pleased to note that my hand didn't shake at all.

He didn't protest or move. He took a few deep breaths, his frail bony arm now helpfully encased in a Harry plaster cast, and roared, "EVANESCO!"

The white chimneys vanished. We waited several seconds to see if the pocket universe exploded and took us with it. Nothing happened.

"Excuse me," Voldemort said politely, peeling himself away from my grasp, and he turned aside and puked very genteelly all over the grass.


	2. Chapter 1b

**Chapter 1b: Uh-Oh, This Is Going To Be Some Day**

After that there was a fair amount of Scourgifying for me to do, followed by a long period of recuperation for poor old Voldemort, or, at any rate, this odd person pretending to be him, who kept announcing that he was all right, then standing up and collapsing again; then a long, confusing discussion in which he burst into tears and kept bemoaning "the other two"; and about an hour later I finally discerned that there were three bombers based here and that the reason the other two weren't on the runway was because they'd already taken off.

"Fly up on a broom and cast Evanesco again," I said.

"_Fly up on a broom?_" he screeched. "Are you even aware that those planes fly at nine hundred miles per hour?"

"But they're not moving."

"How far d'you think they are from this base already, boy?"

"Fly after them," I suggested.

"And we find them, _how?... _by following the con trails," Voldemort concluded. "You know, Potter, you're not half as stupid as you look. But I can't ride a broom."

"You can't _what?_"

"Never suited me. I kept thinking about what would happen if I fell off."

How strange. "OK, I'll give you a backie."

"I'm still terrified of flying. I'll still fall off."

"I'll cast Incarcerous and strap you on, and will you stop whining?" I said, beginning to get irritated with all his excuses.

"WHINING! WHINING! Let me tell you, boy, there is NOTHING so difficult to understand as another person's phobias. I once knew a Estonian who was terrified of travelling by car. He went everywhere on horseback instead. The fact that the horse might get spooked by traffic and throw him under a car didn't seem to bother him. Logic doesn't come into it, boy! THAT'S why they're difficult to understand. Illogical, but _powerful_."

It was hard to dispute the truth of this. I nodded obediently.

"But," he concluded, glancing nervously up at the sky, "the fact remains that sometimes you have to defy them. I think this might be a good time for that." His hands were shaking again. "Where do we get a broom?"

"It's still in my dorm, back at Hogwarts."

Glare. "I don't want some schoolboy's broom, boy. How is _that _supposed to help us catch up with an Eagle?"

"It's a Firebolt," I said indignantly. "It's the fastest fucking broom in the world. The Irish use them!"

"Really?" he said incredulously, then sneered, "Flashboy."

"I didn't buy it, someone gave it to me!"

"You're still a poser. Good thing you've got it, though. Hogwarts?" he enquired, standing and reaching out for me with the dreaded arm.

"I suppose so," I said glumly, and let him crush me against his chest yet again.

000

Hogwarts was, of course, unchanged, and seemed blissfully serene. From the outside I could forget that the castle was filled with mannequins and nothingness and stale air; it was heavy and rugged and quite indifferent to human affairs. Voldemort and I stood on the grass and looked up at it with strange nostalgia.

"Will this get bombed?" I asked.

"D'you mean _would _it get bombed? Of course not, the Muggles don't know it's here. This is probably the safest place in the whole of Britain. Even the fallout might not affect it significantly, depending on the wind direction."

After a moment of further gazing I said "OK, I'll be back in a minute."

I walked hastily through the grounds and into the castle, passing all the frozen figures with a shiver of horror. It was especially nasty seeing the expressions on people's faces; worse, if anything, now that I knew the reason they'd been frozen. I couldn't abide being in here for any longer than necessary, but the only alternative was taking a job as Voldemort's gofer and preventing a nuclear war. Great. I walked past the broken hourglasses feeling very alone.

My dorm was, mercifully, devoid of humans. It looked so familiar and comforting that I stared at it fondly, feeling a mad urge to just stay there. I couldn't face walking back through the statue garden that was the rest of the school, so I put my Quidditch gear in a bag, strapped it to my back and flew out through the window.

Flying above Hogwarts remained as uplifting, in a very literal sense, as ever. I flew a few circles around the towers for pure pleasure, looking down at the Forbidden Forest and the Black Loch; far beyond them the horizon was clear and innocent.

I found Voldie staring at the place in the grounds where Dumbledore's grave would presumably have been: neat rows of chairs, all facing a marble table. I felt a sudden, ferocious desire to stab him to death, and knew I couldn't; after seeing him Vanish the bombs at Lakenheath, I was convinced. That didn't mean I couldn't hate him.

"What's this for?" he asked, indicating the table.

"Never you mind," I said, shaking with anger.

He stared into my eyes. "Dumbledore's grave was to be here? I didn't know the funeral was today." He turned to face the table again and said, "Good thing he's not still alive."

"You'd better not say another word about him," I managed to force out, "because I know I need you to stop the nuclear war, but if you say _anything _about him I'm going to be so angry I might try to kill you."

He glanced round, startled, and said in a much milder tone, "Harry, all I meant was that he would certainly have been powerful enough to resist the temporal stasis spell, and if he had still been here, moving and speaking, that would certainly have been a disaster, since we would have fought with each other and probably ruined everything."

My anger abated to a more or less safe level. I still felt full of intolerable thoughts, but couldn't speak. I stamped down to the loch and stared out at the water for some time, trying not to cry. At last I wandered back up to the castle and found Voldie lying peacefully on the grass, apparently sunbathing.

"Well, I can't spend all day crying," I informed him. "I'm ready to go now, if you are?"

He uncrossed his legs casually and sat up. "Anything else you need from the castle?" he said.

I thought about it. "Don't think so. It's not as if we need an Invisibility Cloak."

He stood up and stared up, for quite a long time, at the castle. I wondered if he was aware that he was looking right at the tower where Dumbledore had been killed.

He turned back to face me. "They'll have to change that bloody school motto, won't they?" he said glumly. "'Do Not Tickle the Dragon's Tail'. All right, let's get going."

000

Back at Lakenheath, he Apparated us at the extreme end of the runway and cast a few spells. These highlighted a faint, bizarrely stationary cloud of smoke, which apparently marked the point at which the second aeroplane had taken off. Voldie seemed to think this was good, as it showed that the plane had relatively recently departed; I put on my Quidditch gear, lent him Ron's gloves and goggles (Ron would have a few words to say about that, I suspected, but it couldn't be helped), and mounted my broom. Voldie marched round and round me, casting spells and muttering to himself.

"Shielding Charm, Warming Charm, pressure regulator, Bubble-Head Charm. Have I missed anything out? Scoping Charm, perhaps, to stop us crashing into the fucking thing... All right, Potter, we're ready to go," he concluded, giving one sharp tap to the top of my head that left it trapped in a bubble of air. "Where d'you want me to tie myself on?"

"Give us your wand and I'll do it," I shouted back, since our dialogue was oddly muffled by the bubbles, and I conjured magical bonds that tied him extremely securely to me. I had more or less resigned myself to hermetic Dark Lord attachment at this stage. "And don't scream in my ear, OK?"

Then I pushed off the ground at full speed and he screamed very loudly in my ear for about five minutes. Fuck's _sake_. Also, he lost control of his Occlumency; so for the first five minutes I flew in dubious curves with tears pouring from my eyes as my forehead split apart, and it's a good thing the planes were nowhere near the base or I'd have smacked straight into them.

"Oi – Voldie," I shouted when I'd managed to get control of my mind and the broomstick. "D'you think you could get a grip on your Occlumency? Or we'll both die."

"I'm trying!" he snapped, and sank into a sulky silence; but the pain slowly abated, so I supposed he'd managed to get his shutters down. This was a great relief, since with him out of the way I could appreciate the ride; I'd not flown this high since Ron and I stole the car in second year, and fuck me, it was gorgeous. I was awed by everything: the light, the rush of air past the shields, the strangely flattened clouds over France; the fact that the edge of the Earth really was curved, and it had taken me seventeen years to notice!

At length I settled into an easy glide at about 150mph, flying along the first set of con trails exactly as if they were a road. This was a lot more comfortable than the flying car; I did a couple of loop-the-loops for pleasure, but stopped when Voldie started screaming again. I made a mental note never to take him on holiday.

At length he said "There. Up ahead, bright green."

"Bright _green?_" I said, squinting and failing to see anything.

"Yes, it's the colour of the Scoping Charm."

I followed the con trails, which grew thicker very rapidly and then terminated in the bum of a second Eagle bomber, which was indeed lime green. I hovered and stared at it; it looked less gigantic up here in mid-air, but deeply sinister, even in the bright sunlight against a carpet of innocent clouds. Perhaps it was the shape, I decided; every part of an aeroplane that would normally be straight was curved, and every part that would normally be broad was a spike. It looked like a grasping, clawed hand. Like Voldemort's hand. The comparison sprang easily to mind, because at that moment he dug his talons into my shoulder, sticking them right through Ron's glove. Sorry, Ron.

"Get away from it," he hissed. "There's no earthly reason for us to be so close. Get AWAY!"

"I was trying to make it easier for you to cast the Vanishing Spell," I said, banking obligingly and relocating the broom about twenty feet away. This elicited further hissing and squawking, plus frenzied scrabbling at my chest.

"I wish you'd get a grip," I muttered.

"I – AM – TRYING!"

At length he managed to calm down slightly; his wand appeared beside my elbow and pointed in the general direction of the plane, shaking wildly once again as though he had cerebral palsy. I resigned myself to controlling the broom with one hand while I tucked his wand arm under my armpit. Once he was thus steadied he did manage to invisible-ise the side of the plane, but the Vanishing Spell once again appeared to be totally beyond him.

After about a minute had gone by I felt his head rest itself on my shoulder as he began to sob.

"We'll just turn round for a minute," I interrupted gently, not really wanting to get puked on again, "and you calm down and think about nothing and stuff, and then we'll have another go."

Strangely enough, that appeared to get his arse in gear; he suddenly sat up straight, wiped his nose glutinously on his sleeve, and cast the Vanishing Spell. The missiles disappeared.

"Dark Lord: 2, bombers: 0," I said in relief. "You're getting quite good at this."

"2?" he said, wiping his nose again and putting his wand away. "Two what? Planes? It's more than that, I did the Tornados before you arrived."

"The Tutshill Tornados?" I said blankly, turning towards the second con trail and jetting off eastwards. I felt the uneasy tingle down my spine that meant Voldie was glaring at me hatefully.

"No, you fool. The RAF's Tornado planes, the ones with nuclear capability. I dealt with them ALL ON MY OWN."

I decided not to mention that this thought made my hair stand on end. "Well done, mate. Good job. – Is that the second plane down there?"

"WHAT? WHERE?" shouted Voldie, digging his claws into my chest. Before I could even howl in agony he relaxed again and said contemptuously, "What would a bomber be doing at that altitude? It's a passenger plane."

"Bummer for the passengers," I said absently, peering down at the little green blob silhouetted against the clouds way below us. "'Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. A nuclear war has broken out and...'"

Voldemort terminated my impromptu comedy turn by punching me in the side of the head. This seemed fair enough to me, so we flew on in sober silence.

000

A couple of hundred miles later, we discovered The Little Problem. We didn't notice it straight away. The cloud cover had petered out by this stage, and we could see straight down to brown, snow-strewn mountains. Voldie found this even more frightening, and was gurgling quietly to himself with, I suspected, his eyes tight shut. This was confirmed when I saw the green blob ahead.

"Voldie," I called. "Hey! Voldie!"

Pause. "Hrm?"

"There's two green things."

"_Two? _High or low?"

"High. – Hey," I said, confused. "It looked as if it was moving."

"What? It can't be fucking moving. Your eyesight is dreadful, Potter. – DEAR GOD!"

Ah, so he'd opened his eyes.

"THAT'S NOT AN AEROPLANE! THAT'S A FUCKING DRAGON!"

Things got moving then. Deciding this counted as a crisis, I accelerated to 300mph. My internal organs did odd things. The green blobs came rapidly closer, and soon even I could see clearly that an indignant green dragon, apparently have mistaken the plane for a rival, was attacking it and trying to chew its wing off.

"Does it matter if just one bomb goes off?" I said, trying to cough the terror out of my chest. I was pretty sure that even one bomb would finish us both.

"ONE BOMB? ONE BOMB? POTTER, IT'S GOT THREE MISSILES ON BOARD, WITH TWENTY-FIVE WARHEADS EACH!"

That was a clincher if ever there was one. "D'you know the Conjunctivitis Charm?" I yelled; Voldemort's only reply was a singularly unhelpful scream, and odd flashes of pain as he struggled to keep his Occlumency under control. Beyond all reasonable expectation, he managed it, which is probably the only reason the world's still here. Leaning so far down my nose almost touched the broomstick, I flew for my life.

The dragon was a Ukrainian Ironbelly, which was good (no fire breath) and bad (fucking huge). I went into a very steep dive right at its face. It heard me at the last minute and swung its head round; I rolled out of the dive at the last possible moment and cast a Stinging Hex right in its eye.

There was a roar so loud that Voldemort, as I later discovered, shat himself, thinking that the bombs had gone off after all; then I had to turn back and swoop at the dragon again, shouting and waving my arm to try to get it to chase me instead of the plane. What spell did I have that made flashing lights, or a loud noise, I wondered frantically, silently reflecting on how fortunate it was the Gryffindor Quidditch players wore long, flowing red robes. "_Relashio!" _I shouted, creating an explosion of sparks that made the dragon snarl; but it still didn't move.

"Right. OK," I said to myself. "You've done this once already during the Triwizard Tournament. Get moving," and I propelled myself down towards the dragon and twisted off to one side in time to avoid a claw to the head. Only just in time, mind you; Voldie was making the broom a lot heavier than usual, plus he was screaming again, which was very distracting. I rose again, dove again, and old leatherywings grunted in fury but wouldn't move away from the plane.

"God almighty!" I said in frustration, and flew down to hover right in front of the dragon's mouth, reversing neatly in time to avoid being bitten in half; but it _still wouldn't bloody move_. There must be some spell I can use to annoy it, something that flashes and bangs and makes a loud noise...

Loud noise. "_Sonorus! _AAAAARGH!" I screamed, almost deafening myself and Voldie; and the dragon at last howled in agony and bashed the plane away from itself. I held my breath. Nothing happened.

Well. When I say "nothing happened", I mean the dragon launched itself at me and did its best to swallow me whole; and soon I was fluttering across the sky like a tiny hawk mobbed by a gigantic rook as I tried to lead the creature as far as possible from the Eagle. This wouldn't have been too difficult, but I couldn't see properly behind me, since Voldie's head was in the way; so I kept oscillating in bizarre curlicues to keep myself away from the claws, and soon felt distinctly seasick. I didn't dare to hope that Voldemort would keep a grip on the contents of his stomach. The back of my robes already felt pretty wet.

"How far are we from the plane?" I shouted, but got no reply; and that, in my opinion, wasn't good at all. What if we we'd only gone a few miles? That was nothing to a dragon. I carried on flying, but fortunately the dragon made up its own mind after a few minutes and flew unhurriedly down towards the mountains.

"It's gone," I observed with surprise. "Hey, Volla, you can open your eyes now. The dragon's buggered off."

"Of course it's buggered off," he said in a weak and understandably miserable voice. "You can't expect even a dragon to hang around forever at this altitude, can you?"

"D'you know which way the plane is now?" I enquired, squinting around the sky, and Voldemort's skinny finger appeared and pointed silently at the distant con trail. I set off towards it at a sedate 100mph. I didn't want to upset his stomach any more than was absolutely necessary.

"How come it was even moving?" I complained as we approached the wonky Eagle. "Everything's supposed to be stabatted!"

He gave a very un-Dark Lord-like snort. "Potter, dear... _power_."

"So there might be dragons everywhere attacking the planes?" I demanded.

"Won't that be fun," he said listlessly.

"Come on..."

"I _hope _it's reasonable to assume that most dragons won't be flying this high up. And by the way," he said with incredible indignation, "I thought I told you _not _to tickle the dragon's tail."

So we parked by the Eagle once again and I jammed Voldie's arm under my armpit and supported his shaky, snaky hand. I hoped he wouldn't drop his wand, but I reflected that if he'd managed to hang on to it while I was dodging the dragon, he wouldn't have much of a problem with this. That lasted until I remembered he was a lot more afraid of bombs than he was of dragons.

"You're doing a great job, Voldemort," I said gently. "Just this one to do, and we'll go down and get changed."

"Shut up," he said, and Vanished the third lot of bombs.

000

It took us a while to get back to Britain, mostly because Voldie was too agitated to Apparate; or rather, I wouldn't let him try, because I was convinced he would splinch us both. I flew as gently as possible across central Europe until Voldie calmed down and asked me to land.

We glided down to earth, well, a pile of broken rocks, by a tarn somewhere in the Carpathians; and I took a leak while Voldemort cleaned copious quantities of sick and crap off our robes. There was so much that I began to feel a bit worried in case he died of dehydration, and persuaded him to cast a Purifying Charm and drink from the tarn.

For my kindness and consideration I got a Dark Lord rant. He stood up with water dripping down the front of his robe, reminding me horribly of Quirrell drinking unicorn blood in the Forbidden Forest, and burst out "Why are you acting so normally, you thick-headed, gurning lunatic?"

That seemed such a non sequitur I just sort of looked at him and said, "What?"

"WHY AREN'T YOU FRIGHTENED?"

"What, what?" I spluttered. "We've done the bombs, _and _the dragon, what's there to be frightened of?"

"Aren't you scared, you bloody idiot?" he said incredulously. "You're not scared about the end of the world?"

I examined my emotions. "No," I said truthfully. "Or, you know. Not pathologically." Not like you, I thought privately, but I didn't say it out loud for fear of setting him off again.

"Depression," he said. "I hate people with depression. No emotions. No fear."

"I think that's just what we need at the moment," I said irritably, "with you screaming and fainting all over."

"Are you coming over all macho on me, boy? Harry the Hero and Voldemort the Fainting Fairy?"

That was quite funny for him. I snorted. "No," I admitted. "I'm not macho. I'm a nerd... I just thought, it's a good thing one of us isn't, er, y'know. Like, puking."

"But sadly, you're not enough of a nerd to know about nuclear physics or how to disarm a warhead."

"Well, no. But neither do you."

"True," he said, and paced about restlessly. At last he sat down on a rock, put his head in his hands and said "I can't believe this is happening."

"You cast a spell that would stop it forty years ago," I said impatiently.

"I know," he said bleakly. "That's the odd thing. The time's gone by far too fast." He stood up. "All right, let's go home."

"Home?" I said, startled. "What, Hogwarts?"

"Nice idea," he said contemplatively, "but it's full of frozen people at the moment, plus, I believe, dead headmasters. I suggest we go to the house I've been using in Wales."

Arm. Apparition.


	3. Chapter 1c

**Chapter 1c: Uh-Oh, This Is Going To Be Some Day**

I found myself in a sunlit kitchen; an expensive, streamlined kitchen that made a most unlikely domicile for half-snake dictators. I was too tired to care. Voldemort let me go and I collapsed at the nearby breakfast bar with all the resilience of a five-foot bolster full of sawdust.

"Hungry?" said Voldemort. "I am. I'm going to get some vegetables out of the larder."

"Vegetables?" I said, suddenly roused. "You're not cooking beetroots again, are you?"

"Well, I have to. It's the only thing I can make. Borscht and weichselstrudel."

"I'll do the cooking," I said very firmly, "and you do important nuclear physics stuff. OK?"

"Perfect," he said. "I didn't know you could cook. Let me explain what everything is."

I thought he meant where, but he really did mean _what _everything was. There was no fridge, just a larder with thick stone walls; and Voldie had set up another Primus stove in the empty fireplace. He fetched me a bucket of water from somewhere, and that was me sorted; I set a vegetable curry going and before long it was bubbling happy away on the stove.

Unnecessary for the moment, I peered around the kitchen. There was a pile of stuff in the corner, personal effects and pot plants, that Voldemort seemed to have moved out of the way. On the dining table, conversely, was a vast mountain of nuclear textbooks, all of them bristling with bookmarks, and an equally vast pile of notes. I tried reading the notes, but they practically all seemed to be written in Sciencese and I had to stop because they were making my brain bleed. Then I saw something else.

Sitting on the corner of the table was a fat little metal box with a handle. It was shaped vaguely like a public telephone, although obviously much smaller; there was a body and a thing like an earpiece, connected by a cord. It was otherwise distinguished only by being the single most battered object I had ever encountered. Half the orange paint had been scratched or flaked away, and the case itself was heavily dented. Written on it was gibberish in letters that were half English, well, y'know, European, and half weird. I found a switch and turned it on. It crackled like a detuned radio.

It suddenly occurred to me that this was some kind of important scientific apparatus, and an extremely superannuated one at that; and if I assumed that the weird writing was Russian, then that suggested Voldemort had been carrying it around with him for the whole of the Cold War. I knew he liked to hoard things, but this seemed extreme; ergo, it was a possible Horcrux.

I lifted it cautiously and wondered how you were supposed to tell. Dumbledore, I realised, hadn't actually been very helpful with the identifying and destroying bit. Perhaps it would make my scar hurt? I held it against my forehead. Nothing. I closed my eyes and concentrated: was that a faint twinge? No. Nothing at all.

"Er, Harry," came a strained voice from the door, and I spun round to see Voldie leaning against the doorjamb, his face a study in disbelief. "Harry, dear, I think we can safely say your scar isn't radioactive. If you want, I can cast a Röntgen Charm..."

"Oh, shut up," I said, blushing like neon. "I thought this was... some sort of Dark artefact thing."

"Oh, lord," he moaned, "you're not going to try and destroy it, are you? Look, Harry, please, _not the dosimeter_. We might need it. Oh, and you use the phone to measure radiation. You don't have to pick up the whole thing."

"Well, I wasn't," I said. "You do like collecting stuff, though, don't you?"

"So?" he said, nettled. "You get attached to humans. I get attached to things. Things and snakes," he said, sitting down at the breakfast bar. "Oh, and you might have noticed that the stove only works if you're standing close to it."

I whirled round, looked at the stove. The blue flames were quite immobile. "Bugger!"

"It's all right. It won't have gone cold. It just won't have got any hotter."

"Yes, well," I muttered. I walked closer to the Primus and watched the flames leap into motion. "Why do we use the Primus, anyway?"

"Don't you want to?" he said in mild surprise. "I like it. And besides, I don't know how to cook with fire."

I didn't, either, so that ruled out magical cookery. I sat next to the stove for the next twenty minutes and resolved not to try any baking. I also watched Voldemort's face; or I say Voldemort's, but it didn't look like him. The scaffolding that supported his features appeared to have been rearranged. On the brief but memorable instances on which we had previously met, he had gloated, and sneered, and grimaced with hatred; but now his face was relaxed and soft. He still frowned, and glared, and screamed, of course; but he sat and brooded over _Button Mushrooms: The Terrifying Simplicity Of Mechanised Warfare _like a person, not a murderous monster. This was odd and disturbing. It was as if there were two Voldemorts.

Moving all the papers off the dining table was clearly a fool's errand. We sat at the breakfast bar and ate our curry.

"Don't you want to ask me anything?" Voldemort said abruptly. "You've been helpful, boy. I can answer your questions, if you want."

It was a bit of a question of where to start, wasn't it? I found my mind was suddenly blank. I ate a bit more curry.

"Why don't you want to steal the bombs and use them against your enemies?" I said thoughtfully.

"ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?" he screeched.

"Well, plenty of insane dictators do."

"It's not the _in_sane ones that are the problem," he said. "If you've noticed, it's elected mediocrities that are pushing the buttons at the moment. You think _I'm _the mad one? As far as I'm concerned, they've all got Icarus Syndrome. 'I wonder if I can make a weapon that'll destroy all my enemies in one enormous explosion?... oops, my wings have melted.'"

"How did the war start?" I enquired.

"Don't know, don't care."

"Oh." Now that he mentioned it, I didn't much care either, as long as the world didn't get destroyed.

"And in an attempt to give a serious answer to your previous question: the British magical community is microscopic. I suppose I could steal a bomb and, assuming I could manage to handle it without dying of terror, wipe out Central London; that would get rid of Diagon Alley, St. Mungo's and the Ministry. Then I could do in Hogsmeade; bye-bye Hogwarts. And where would that leave the Dark Lord, boy? There'd be nothing to rule. I'm not fighting against some Muggle country with millions of people, where I could bomb down two cities yet leave most of the population still alive. I'd have killed all the magicians."

This seemed logical. I very much doubted he would want to bomb Hogwarts. "Yeah, but the Muggles. You could wipe them out."

He glared at me sulphurously, showing his little lower fangs. "You are an absolute ignoramus, Potter. It's not your fault," he conceded, "since practically all wizards are, and most Muggles, too, but the fact still stands. _In order to wipe out the Muggles I would have to destroy the entire habitable environment of this planet."_

"Buggered."

"Quite."

"Right. OK. Why aren't you trying to kill me?"

"We've been through this. I need you."

Well, yes. However, it seemed to me that he didn't need an assistant and general dogsbody so much as a surrogate mother and psychiatric nurse. "Listen: I know this sounds like a stupid question, but why are you so scared?"

He glared at me. "It's not a stupid question," he said, and carried his empty bowl over to the pot sink. Placing it on the draining board, he drew himself up to his full height, head nearly scraping the oak beams, and announced, "I have radiophobia."

I waited for some kind of mental activity to initiate, but none did. I could only think how odd it was that Voldemort was afraid of radios.

"A phobia of radiation, boy! Of ballistic missiles and uranium and basically anything in any way connected with nuclear fission. So go on. Laugh at me."

He curled up in a ball on the floor and glared at me over his shoulder. "Well? Aren't you laughing?"

"Yeah, cos I find it really funny when the bloke who killed my parents has hysterics while we're getting bombed," I said, bemused.

He punched the flags in frustration. "Don't get any idea into your head about killing me, boy. Don't think to yourself 'I'll wait till all the warheads are disarmed but one, and then kill him in revenge for my parents'. We can't afford to do that."

"I wouldn't!" I snapped, monstrously offended.

"Oh," he said, peering more closely at me, "and I see you know it wouldn't work anyway. So you know about my Horcruxes? You're less incompetent than I thought."

Well, so much for my secret-keeping abilities, I thought. I managed to keep the fact I knew about the Horcruxes quiet for a total of eight or nine hours, and now Voldie knows everything. Just perfect. Then I realised it didn't much matter anyway; like he said, all bets were off until we could get the nuclear war cancelled. I said as much. That was a mistake.

"DON'T PRESUME! DON'T YOU DARE PRESUME, BOY! 'WHEN THE WAR IS OVER'! – WASH YOUR MOUTH OUT!"

"OK, sorry," I was starting to say, when I realised he was actually serious.

"Come here! Wash your mouth out! NOW!"

"What, literally?" I spluttered somewhat redundantly, as he'd already grabbed the back of my collar and was forcing me towards the sink.

"Fuck off!" I yelled as he jammed his wand in my face and cast Aguamenti.

"You tempted the fates! NEVER SAY IT AGAIN!"

"Fine, I won't say it again," I shouted in exasperation, and gargled a big mouthful of water. "Washed out. Happy now?"

"NO! MORE!"

When I'd been drinking and choking for a good minute, he muttered that it would have to do and let go of the back of my neck. I was in mild shock. I was starting to get what he meant when he said he was radiophobic. "Right," I said. "OK."

"It's not OK."

"Where are the people who live in this house?" I enquired, towelling my hair dry.

"In the shed."

"What were they doing in the shed?"

"Fixing a bicycle."

"Are they dead?"

"No," he said. "Dead Muggles don't really do much for the atmosphere."

"Yeah, right!" I said. "You _love _dead Muggles!"

"Not when I'm trying to relax!" he shouted, glowering at me horribly yet again.

"And where are we going to sleep?"

"There are four bedrooms," he said. "I've got the first one on the right. I'll cast a darkness spell for you if you can't sleep in the sun."

"I can do that," I said, monumentally offended.

"Then do it," he said shortly, and stalked off to the bathroom like a crow heading for a nice juicy battlefield; which, come to think of it, was precisely what we were doing.

I had no dreams at all.


	4. They Are Afraid To Eat And To Drink And

**How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Lord Voldemort**

**Chapter 2: They Are Afraid To Eat And To Drink And To Breathe**

In the morning, or rather, when I awoke into the static sunlight and continued where I'd left off the previous day, I wandered into the garden. In Wales the sun was only just rising; yet another surreal note: drops of dew strewn poised under the first rays of a motionless sun. I touched a droplet on the end of a long plant thingy, and it detached itself obligingly onto my finger; I gave a start of surprise at the sight of something actually following the laws of physics, and the water fell off my finger and onto the shining lawn. It was bizarrely beautiful.

I trundled back towards the house, wondering as I did so why Voldemort was living in such a palatial gaff; then I rounded a corner and got a horrible shock as I looked into a slit-pupilled red eye accompanied by an enormous white saucer. After a brief myocardial infarction I managed to identify this apparition as Voldie, who was glaring at me from the other end of an enormous telescope.

"Might as well give up at this point," he drawled, still staring at me down the telescope as though I were a particularly interesting constellation. "It's much too light to make out anything other than the most basic information. I could have calculated most of this anyway from star charts."

"What are you looking for?" I managed, trying to get over the shock.

"Strong reading from Mars – any idiot could have told me that... no, it's impossible in daylight. To do a proper forecast I'd have to Apparate to somewhere on the dark side of the Earth. And I am _not_ doing that," he said with sudden vehemence, releasing the telescope very abruptly so that it swung downwards and mashed my knuckles against the windowsill.

"So you're making a star chart?" I said, since he obviously couldn't be bothered to tell me. For a moment I'd thought he was searching for airborne missiles. "Why can't we go to the dark side?"

He glared at me again, then grumbled "I am afraid of the dark," and walked off into the kitchen.

"This is a very posh house," I observed, joining him at the breakfast bar and rooting around for the cornflakes.

"It's the first thing I did when it all went off."

"First thing you did?" I said blankly.

"I ran around like a headless chicken," he said, and then paused with a sour expression, apparently rolling this concept around his mouth and finding it unpalatable.

"And then what?"

"Just looked for a place where there were no people. I didn't want to see frozen bodies everywhere. And I also needed everything to work properly, which in a normal house would be quite difficult. This is an environmental centre, a sustainable earth-block house with a composting toilet. Just the thing, really... I needed a base, preferably one that wouldn't frighten me even more."

"Frighten you?"

"Well, I wasn't exactly going to camp under a silo."

"Dumbledore said darkness and dead bodies were nothing to be afraid of," I said doubtfully. "That they only represented the unknown."

"Dumbledore was an idiot," said Voldemort.

"Fuck off."

"Take your head out of his backside, Harry. Surely even you can't think he was right about this. All right," he conceded, with the expression of one undergoing root canal surgery, "he knew about Transfiguration, and probably a lot of other things, although actually admitting it nearly kills me. But he knew fuck all about insanity."

I pondered what an odd statement this was. "He wasn't insane."

"But I am, and so are you."

"I am not mad!"

"Madness, mental illness, call it whatever you like. I have a phobia, and you have... Harryitis, a rare form of depression causing despair, anger, and fits of loud shouting."

"Thanks."

"You're welcome. I suppose it comes from his growing up in the mid-nineteenth century. Not a good time to be mad... if there ever is a good time to be mad... Anyway, he failed to perceive that the logical way of looking at things is not always the correct way."

"He liked music," I said absently.

"But he hated madness. Saw it as weakness, refusing to shoulder one's burdens."

"It doesn't sound like him," I said uncertainly.

"He was very out of date about a lot of things."

I decided that was enough of that, and ate my cornflakes in silence before slamming the spoon down and saying "Right. What are we going to do today?"

Glare. "We're going to pick flowers, Potter."

"Yeah, I know we're doing bombs and stuff, just _what_, all right?"

"I don't know," he admittedly shortly, taking the dishes to the sink with a shrug.

Bad, bad news. "Well, if _you _don't know, then..."

"There are other wizards," he said in a frustrated voice. "That's the only thing I'm sure of. There are a few wallies I've met over the years who are probably making some effort to do something useful, but there seems to be this élite, this clique, that are rather relevant and that I know almost nothing about..."

"More powerful than you?" I said, startled.

He turned round from the sink, smiled at me as if I were his favourite person in the world and said "I love how you think that's amazing."

"_Well_," I said.

"But what to do today," he said, frowning. "I don't know if you've noticed, child, but I haven't actually got a plan."

"You mentioned it yesterday," I agreed.

"I can't..." he began, and then broke off with a sigh that made my hair stand on end; it sounded less a human exhalation than a building crumbling into ruins. He turned back to the sink and braced his arms on the worktop. "I can't do it," he muttered. "I just can't do it."

I sat and thought about how incongruous his snake skin and black robes looked like against the innocent sun, and how this would be a good time to administer comfort if one were talking to a normal person; and I wondered how one comforts a death-eating maniac in any case. Perhaps I should offer him a Muggle to kill? I said, "You did fine yesterday."

He started puking delicately, making little dry heaves over the sink, and I went rather resignedly to pat his back. It was only when my hand made contact with the cloth that he turned to face me, grinning, and I saw that he wasn't puking at all; he was giggling hysterically.

"Oh, Harry," he said, "yesterday I really was not doing very well at all. If I had any sense or sanity, I'd have checked the planes' locations using the computers at the base, and then... well, I don't know what we'd have done then, but I'm sure it would have been better. Or, in a vastly superior scenario, I could have made a _proper _plan well in advance and Imperioed Yeltsin and Clinton and Netanyahu and forced them to act sensibly, but no, I was too scared, and now it's a bit late."

_Oh dear_. "Well, anything's better than nothing, right?" I said, trying to be pragmatic. "So what can we do today?"

"Well," he said, getting a glass of water, "I suppose the logical course of action would be to remove the bombs from Trident, since we've done the planes, but I've no idea how we're going to do that."

"Er?"

He gulped down his water and looked at me pityingly. "Submarines. Big. Heavy. _Underwater_."

"Planes big and heavy and up in the sky," I pointed out.

"They deploy lightweight gravity bombs, you fool. Trident missiles weigh about two hundred times as much. And they'll all be _at sea_, so we're buggered anyway."

"You said we could find them using the computers."

Voldemort fixed me with a hate-filled glare, his irises resembling molten magma, and said, "They are UNDERWATER."

"What – "

"I AM NOT GOING UNDER THE SEA!" he shouted, banging his glass on the worktop so hard he made the dishes rattle. He breathed hard for a while, apparently speechless, then continued, "NOT DOWN THERE IN THE DARK AT THE BOTTOM OF THE OCEAN! I MIGHT DIE DOWN THERE AND NEVER COME BACK UP AGAIN! NEVER FUCKING EVER!"

OK, he didn't like oceans. I got the hint. "Can't you say Accio Bomb?" I suggested hastily.

Slightly calmer now, he rolled his eyes at me and said scornfully, "An ingenious plan, Harry, with only the minor flaw that in the unlikely event of our successfully Summoning a thing that weighs about sixty tonnes, it would smash through the side of the submarine and blow up the west coast of Scotland."

"Oh."

"'Oh!' Yes, boy, oh. So..." he drummed his fingers for a bit and said, "All right. We can't do anything with the Muggles or most of the magicians, seeing as they're all frozen. We can Vanish the weaponry and try to find whatever other magicians there are who've withstood the temporal stasis spell. Oh, and gather information. Better not spend too much time wanking about, though, if there are dragons rampaging around destroying everything."

"How do we find the other magicians?" I said.

"Haven't got a clue," he admitted, "so I think now is a good time to gather information. Ministry or Muggle?"

"What are we doing at the Ministry?"

"Trying to find out whether they've done anything, first," he said. "But seeing as the answer is almost certainly No, we'll have to check up on the prophecies."

He wanted to take me to the Department of Mysteries. Specifically, to the room with all the prophecies in it, the one in which I had inadvertently doomed Sirius. How _wonderful_. "Muggle," I said.

Glare. "I knew you would say that. I hate you."

Er. "You don't want to do that?"

"Of course not. IT'S TERRIFYING."

"D'you think I like going in the fucking Department of Mysteries?" I snapped.

"Listen, you ignorant – "

"What do we need a prophecy for, anyway?! There's a war! We KNOW there's a war! How's a prophecy supposed to help?"

"Because it might _tell_ us whether we are going to _succeed!_"

"Oh, yeah, fucking brilliant idea, and if it says we're NOT going to succeed? What're you going to do then?!"

"SHUT UP! NOW!"

"MY GODFATHER DIED THERE! YOU WOULDN'T REMEMBER THAT, OF COURSE, SINCE IT DIDN'T HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH YOU!"

Voldemort Vanished my private parts, and I responded with the first spell that came to mind, which was the Bat-Bogey Hex. This resulted in chaos as he crashed round the house trying to claw the bats out of his face, and I followed him while shouting at him to give my bits back; and he finally Restored them with very ill grace and things went kind of back to normal.

He cleaned the bits of snot off his robes, glared at me and said, "We will go to the Muggle bases today, but only because it's absolutely imperative that we do so. After that, we will go to the Department of Mysteries. No ifs or buts."

"All right," I conceded reluctantly, although I couldn't for the life of me see how a prophecy was supposed to help, and personally thought they did much more harm than good. Oh, and if one of us happened to trip and fall through the Veil, I was pretty sure it wasn't going to be me.

000

There followed a strange, smelly and boring interlude in which Voldemort Apparated me to at least three different military bases; I couldn't say exactly how many, because they all looked the same. I observed that any secret military base must contain the following elements:

- Beige paint;

- Few or no windows;

- Terrifying, 2ft-thick blast doors;

- Indescribably ancient computer terminals that looked as if a '60s wireless had mated with the BBC Micro's grandma;

- Blokes in shirts and ties frozen in the middle of trundling placidly round as if they didn't have a care in the world;

- Weird, 100ft-high structures that I thought might possibly serve the same function as Easter Island statues, including pyramids and giant golf balls.

"Sit down here and don't do anything," Voldemort ordered, plonking me down on a decrepit swivel chair in the middle of the room. "I want you to keep quiet while I do the important stuff."

"So why am I here?" I said, baffled.

"I want company," he said shortly.

I sat around reading the birthday cards on the bulletin boards while Voldemort poked round the room, muttering to himself. Eventually he started to tap away at the computer keys; then there was an abrupt silence followed by a shout of rage.

"What?" I said, peering cautiously round a stationery cupboard to see him flinging coffee mugs at the antediluvian monitor.

"IT'S – FUCKING – FROZEN. THEY'RE ALL FROZEN. I can't bring up any information because they can't connect to their data source. And there might be some problems with regard to electricity, of course, but... FUCK."

I digested this. "So there's no point in us being here."

"In OUR being here. Of course there's a point. There are data on the screens and I can use them. Problem is, it'll be dribs and drabs and all entirely fragmented. GOD DAMN these stupid..."

But he couldn't seem to think what it what that god should damn, so he wandered round muttering again and taking notes with a pen and paper because the printers didn't work. I sat on the swivel chair and absently kicked my legs back and forth to pass the time.

After taking about a dozen pages of notes, Voldemort finally grunted in satisfaction, held out his arm and whisked us off to the next lair. Once there, however, he seemed less happy. The muttering took on a sardonic tone, then became pessimistic, and then silent altogether. At last he resorted to hiding behind pieces of furniture and suddenly jumping out at me. He stared at me with wild eyes, and I just sat and stared back; I couldn't think what else to do, really.

"Are you all right?" I asked as he shuffled back to his computer, hyperventilating. He cast a jaundiced look over his shoulder and didn't say anything.

"I'm really me, you know," I assured him. "I haven't been replaced by Barty Crouch using Polyjuice. I can tell you my favourite flavour of jam, if you like."

This only elicited some terrified rolling of eyes. Evidently he was going radiophobic again. I sighed, looked round the room, and conceded that it really wasn't a very cheerful atmosphere. "Tell you what, Vol," I said, "we should go outside and have a cigarette or whatever. It's getting stuffy in here."

He didn't respond, but when I stood up and waited by the door, he did come out with me.

Outside, things were much better. The base was set between moors and farmland, with a beautiful, sunny view, and I was amused to find that the immediate vicinity was an expanse of rough white sedge that was being grazed by sheep. I couldn't decide if this was disrespectful or simply pragmatic. Then I was terribly disconcerted when I turned round to see a little mountain range of about twenty enormous white golf balls, as if vast mushrooms had decided to grow out of the moor.

"Er, Voldie," I said, "there's giant white things here."

"Yes," he said absently. "They have radar dishes inside."

"Oh. I thought they were really big mushrooms."

"'But unless they could transform this tiny mushroom into the biggest and strongest thing on earth, the people would not consider themselves happy... And anyone... who smelled the bad odour, died.' Excuse me," he said, and puked everywhere. After what had happened yesterday, this wasn't really unexpected. I silently hoped it wouldn't start coming out of the other end as well.

"You're doing really well," I consoled him. "It's been – " I checked the time – "an hour and forty minutes."

He spat for a long time, Scourgified his mouth and conjured a glass of water with which he gargled loudly. Then he sat and sourly surveyed the countryside.

"I hate Apparition," he said. "You get the destination without the journey. If we'd travelled here Mugglewise, or by broom, we'd have travelled across that moor there, maybe past all those reservoirs. D'you think wizards realise that? Maybe they don't understand that there's supposed to be a journey."

"THEN WHY DID YOU APPARATE US HERE?" I said between gritted teeth.

"I said I didn't like it," he said loftily. "I didn't say it wasn't necessary. D'you want me to leave that dragon to eat all the Romanians? Shut up then. As I was saying: witzy society must suffer terribly from travelling instantly to wherever they please. It's dangerous to get what you want."

"Is it useful, the stuff you're finding?" I asked.

"No," he said, "but it's better than nothing. Confirms what I already knew. I had plenty of time to read the papers before you arrived."

Before I arrived? I hadn't arrived. He'd come and found me. I wondered if he was losing the remnants of his feeble sanity. Mind you, he said I was mad as well. It could be true, I supposed. "I thought the papers were full of tits."

"Bollocks, I think you mean," he said. "But it's possible to pick out the salient bits from amongst the rubbish." He took another swig on his glass of water, maintaining an amusingly revolted face as though it were vinegar. "NO WIND," he shouted. "No bloody wind. In all the nuclear war books and films and what-have-you, they trundle outside and it's completely silent (because everyone's dead or frozen, obviously) and there's only the wind to make a noise and they stand and listen to the wind and it underlines their isolation and what-have-you. And distributes fallout. And now it finally happens in real life – and we might be the only people who'll ever experience this, mark you! For all I know, anyway – and there _isn't _any wind. Ha ha! Take that, Raymond Briggs."

I was sitting on a rock. I wondered if I should stand up and start backing away slowly. At this rate I would get covered in brains when Voldie's head exploded.

"So," he sighed, taking a drink from his glass of water. "Feeling a bit better now. Nice out here, isn't it? It's a good thing you took me outside."

"You just take your time," I said cautiously. "You don't have to go back in just yet."

"Not much point," he said. "I've got almost everything worth getting in there... God, my head hurts. I hate VDUs."

"What's the charm that cures headaches?" I said absently.

"NO! NO!" he shouted. "I HAVE TO SUFFER!"

I decided this conversation wasn't really getting anywhere. "Can I have a drink too?"

He conjured up some pumpkin juice. We sat and drank in silence and stared at the view; the sheep and the sunny moors, and the nuclear power stations on the horizon.


	5. Chapter 2b

**They Are Afraid To Eat And To Drink And To Breathe**

**Chapter 2b**

So many bases, and so few people who were running around screaming and waving their arms because the end of the world had come. A lot of them looked grumpy, or were shouting into phones, but you wouldn't look at any of the tableaux and conclude that war had broken out. I was confused.

"Voldie," I said, "how come they don't know what's happened?"

"Because they are hapless drones who have no more of an executive role than we do," he said absently, still writing at warp speed on his pad. "If Blair were the driver, which he isn't, this lot would be the flies on the windscreen." Then he gave me a complicated breakdown of the chain of command, which seemed to be more like a big pile of barbed wire. When he'd finished I was both unsatisfied and bored. I decided not to ask any more.

We found just one bloke who presumably had had an inkling of what was coming, and Voldie said so; "Ah," he said from inside a little office, "this guy obviously knew what was going to happen."

I stood up curiously, walked towards the door. Long before I could see the man himself I could see how red the grey carpet was. The bloke had cut his throat.

"Who is he?" I said wonderingly, trying not to look at his neck. Perhaps Avada Kedavra was better after all. "Did he get the news first, or..."

Voldemort said, "Well, we won't find out now, will we?"

000

Our final Secret Base had flashing lights, dancing robots and pink potted pelicans. No, I jest; it was pretty much identical to the previous ones, except with, fortunately, no bodies. I was beginning to get disorientated by the beige metal maze, but Voldie seemed reasonably happy there; although for the life of me I couldn't think why, because the computers were even worse.

"These computers are so shit," I said, unable to believe my eyes. "We had better ones at primary school."

"I love your idea of government cash flow."

"They look like they were made in 1953."

"You should have seen the ones we actually _used _in 1953. I can't get the hang of these new ones."

"'We' used... you..."

"I worked for the MGB." Pause. "And the CIA, and MI6."

"Er... the MGB's..."

"I was a spy for the Americans, the Russians, and the British."

"They were on, like, opposite sides...?"

He hooted with laughter for some time, apparently greatly cheered by my stupidity, and said, "I was a triple agent, dear."

"But the government didn't find out?"

"I had several different names and appearances."

"The Ministry for Magic?" I began. "And the Russian Ministry for Magic? And the American Ministry for Magic!"

"There wasn't one Soviet Ministry for Magic," he said. "There was (and still is) the Ukrainian Ministry, the Estonian Ministry, the Russian Ministry, blah blah blah, so whenever I crossed a former state line, I was someone else's responsibility. They were divided about whether to bring in the Aurors, as well. I remember the Belorusians declined to bother; they said whatever I was doing, I was doing it to Muggles, not magicians, so it wasn't their lookout. Where was I? Oh, as for the British, I expect they knew someone was out there," he concluded, "but you're severely overestimating international relations if you think they could cooperate on something like that."

"I saw Cornelius Fudge trying to cooperate with one of the Bulgarian Ministry," I remembered.

"Really?" said Voldemort, suddenly showing his fangs in great amusement. "What did he say."

I tried to remember. "He said, 'THIS... IS... HARRY... POTTER. You know, the Boy-Who... oh, come on, you must know who Harry Potter is...'"

Voldemort collapsed on the floor and hugged his ribs, crying with laughter. I was very impressed with my own ability to amuse.

"That's about it," he said when he finally stopped laughing. "'HAVE – YOU – SEEN – A – SPY – AROUND – HERE?' I mean, Harry, forget it."

"Who did you spy on?" I asked after a while.

"Various nuclear projects."

"Did you sabotage them?"

"Sometimes."

I sat slowly absorbing this (please forgive me for this word choice) bombshell. Eventually it occurred to me that perhaps he was lying. Did that matter? I wasn't sure. I kicked my heels vaguely and kept Voldemort amused by reading out the _Dilbert _strips someone had taped to their monitor.

Eventually I got up and walked towards the door.

"Don't go out," he said sharply.

"I only wanted to find the toilet."

He dithered. I crossed my legs and bounced up and down. "Hurry up," he muttered.

"Will I get killed by escaped radiation?" I asked, which earned me another hate-filled stare and the words, "Don't be so ridiculous. I need you here, that's all."

"I'm not doing anything!"

"I'm afraid to be here on my own," he mumbled, and shoved his head violently into his notebook to escape the embarrassment of this admission.

He carried on working there, occasionally scribbling notes and muttering to himself, for some hours. The work was no doubt vital, but from my perspective it was also extremely boring, and I eventually pushed three chairs together and fell asleep.

Some time later I suddenly woke up, not sure why I was awake, but certain that something undesirable was going on; and I sat there in complete perplexity for a good two seconds, listening to silence, looking at stillness, and unable to figure out what had woken me.

Then there was a sharp prod to the back of my head, and I looked round to see a wild-eyed Voldemort wielding a ruler, taut with horror and clearly trying to stay as quiet as possible.

"There was a noise from the corridor, boy," he murmured, trying as hard as possible not to move his lips. "I know I heard something."

I listened, and heard nothing whatsoever. "It's nothing," I said patiently. "You're getting wound up." He looked quite irate, so I added hastily, "I'll go and have a look."

I got up and trundled into the corridor without much fear at all. I'd gone for so long without seeing any animate being, apart from Voldie, that it was becoming difficult to conceive of their existence. Also, there was the sunlight; if time had stopped at midnight, I expect it would have been different, but trapped in perpetual breakfast-time I found it difficult to take things seriously.

I strode confidently down the corridor, then hesitated. It had only been the faintest noise, like a bird ruffling its wing, but there had _been _a noise. I supposed, all the same, that it might just have been Voldie shifting his robes. I carried on.

Yep. Footsteps.

It didn't actually even occur to me to be frightened. I was intrigued that somebody else was animate. I walked excitedly in the direction of the noise, and the invisible person walked away again. The pseudo-hide-and-seek seemed so funny that I ran after them at full pelt; they ran away equally quickly, and I careered around a corner and smack into the door swinging open behind them. I reeled back, stunned, with one hand to my poor old right eye; and by the time I recovered, all sound had gone.

I peered round the door. The room inside was some kind of storage cupboard, quite windowless. In the dark, an ultramarine glow was slowly returning to black.

Rather late in the day, I felt a chill of unease. Mr/Ms Mystery presumably hadn't Apparated, since I would have heard them; Portkey perhaps? I didn't know, and I was wondering if I should have gone back and got Voldemort as soon as I heard the footsteps. I trundled back to him and his computer feeling unnerved and slightly sheepish.

Voldemort, poor sod, looked as if he'd been Petrified. When he saw me he sagged visibly back into his chair and gave a vast sigh of relief through his nose.

"Well?" he said. "Is everything OK?"

"I don't know," I confessed. "I heard someone, but they ran away before I saw them. I followed them into like a stock cupboard, but they'd already gone."

"Apparated?"

"Nope, no sound. There was just like a blue glow."

Voldemort jerked as if I'd shoved a fork in his testicles. "A BLUE GLOW? WHAT BLUE GLOW?"

I backed away, alarmed. "A glow. It was blue."

"WHERE WAS IT COMING FROM? HOW LONG DID IT LAST?"

"It wasn't coming from anywhere, it was just... in that room, and it faded away when I walked in!"

"_Aparecio Dozimetr_," he said tersely, and his battered telephone thing appeared out of nowhere. He switched it on, then detached the mouthpiece and swept it up and down my body. It emitted occasional crackles.

"You're not irradiated," he said suspiciously. "WHAT THE HELL BLUE GLOW ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT, YOU MORON?!"

"GO IN THE FUCKING STOCK CUPBOARD YOURSELF AND LOOK!"

"What colour was it?" he demanded. "Light blue, dark blue?"

"Dark. Ish. Can light be dark?"

"Think about it hard," he instructed me, grabbing my shoulders with his cold claws, and he stared into my eyes. I stared back at him and tried to picture the blue glow, and tried not to blink; my eyes started to water horribly, but Voldemort seemed satisfied.

"Well, that wasn't the blue flash at all," he commented, releasing me at last. "You shouldn't say such stupid things. That was some sort of magic. I wonder what it was? And as for the person who cast it... who were they, and why didn't they stick around?"

"I don't know, do I?" I said, rubbing my shoulders. "And what the fuck's the blue flash?"

"Air becoming ionised during a criticality incident. And no, you don't know _anything_. I keep telling you that."

"Then why do you keep being SO SURPRISED when I BUGGER THINGS UP?!"

"Fine," he said between gritted fangs. "I thought you had been fatally irradiated by some sort of accident with fissile material. Since that was totally irrational and the fruit of radiophobia, just ignore it. What we need to concentrate on is this magical stalker, so take me to the stock cupboard."

This was the only sensible thing he'd said so far, so I marched off to the cupboard and flung the door open. Inside there was nothing remarkable whatsoever.

Voldie waved his wand around and said "There's nothing here."

"Thank you, Mr Obvious."

"Did you hear the crack of Apparition?"

"No, and I would have."

"Very advanced magician, then; but we knew that anyway."

"Well, if they're a very advanced magician," I said, uncomprehending, "why did they appear in this place and walk round the corridors watching us, instead of, like, casting a spell so they could see what we were doing?"

"Why indeed," he muttered, and his eyes took on an abyssal glint as he started obsessively cataloguing all sorts of dire reasons why somebody might be making walking noises in a military base. I watched with dismay, trying to judge whether this was a sign of demented paranoia or highly justified suspicion.

"Oh well," he said, suddenly snapping out of it. "I'm mostly finished here, and if that person was dangerous, we shouldn't hang around. Let's go."

"Good idea," I agreed. "Are we going home?"

"Well, we don't have to," he said playfully, wrapping his arm round me. "We could go to a beach in Cornwall, but of course the sun won't be properly up there yet, and up here it's too cold... no, let's go home."

000

Back at the house in Wales, I found I was once again exhausted. I wondered how much time had gone by; presumably my body was still trying to conduct itself by the twenty-four-hour clock. I staggered off to "my bedroom" and took a prolonged nap.

I woke up after a totally anticlimactic dream about Snape assigning me homework, and was disturbed at finding myself in Wales with a madman. I was even more disturbed to find he'd cooked himself some more borscht. He sat at the table and pored intently over his dull books while I opened the windows and tried to fan away the smell.

"That won't work," he said absently, playing tunes on his claws with a ballpoint pen. "The air can't flow normally due to the stasis spell. You'll just have to cook something else."

"If the air can't flow normally, how do we breathe?" I demanded as I got out the pans for sancocho, and was punished with an explanation that lasted the entire length of the boiling stage, so "Well, if you know all that, how come you didn't know the computers would stop working?" I grumbled as I put the lid on.

Voldemort ignored me ostentatiously from behind _Trinity, Divinity: Nuclear Warfare In The Politics And Psychology Of The Developed World._

"You really didn't plan this very well," I said grumpily. "Isn't there some kind of spell you can cast to stop all the bombs detonating?"

He lowered the book, raised the best eyebrow of all time and said, "Such as what?"

I screwed my face up a bit and said "Isn't there a thing called Star Wars, and it shoots the missiles out of the sky?"

"That would never have worked," he said. "Or let me clarify: it doesn't work at present and I personally don't believe it ever will. Also, if it _did _function as planned, it would simply cause the bombs to detonate at extremely high altitude; which would reduce the damage enormously but is so far from a perfect scenario that we can safely rule it out."

"Then we need some kind of, some blanket spell," I said, pleased at having expressed it comprehensibly, "that affects the principle that makes them go off."

"Hm," he said through his nose in an dangerously superior tone, staring at a dead bluebottle on the windowsill. "And you want magicians to have that sort of control over reactions at the atomic level, do you? Think they'll use it responsibly? Confident that nothing will ever go wrong? Very likely."

"That's a no, then."

"That's a no."

"You still didn't plan it very well."

"I know."

When I'd put the pan on to simmer he flashed his eyes at me and said "Come over here and let me explain something."

"What, again?" I moaned, shuffling unwillingly over to the table. "Everything you tell me is so boring!"

"Yes," he said laconically. "The end of the world is _so _boring."

"All right, smart-arse. Come on, then."

"Thank you, Professor. Now, listen. When I was skulking about the nuclear projects in the forties and fifties, it became increasingly obvious that the expected people weren't always in control, Truman being the obvious example. So in between skulks I spent my time searching for secret élites."

"Magic or Muggle?"

"Clever boy. There was magic involved. It took a very long time to find it, though, I must admit. For every interesting thing I discovered there were fifty weirdos, psychotics and charlatans. I expect you know the Muggle governments in the mid-twentieth century – well, for the whole of history, actually – hired all sorts of so-called magicians and psychics to kill their enemies and preserve their lives and so forth. Needless to say, their discrimination left a lot to be desired; they would hire anyone, basically. A few of these quack types appear to have been near-Squibs – that's the kindest thing you can say about them – who managed to scrape together some kind of spell, but needless to say it was usually completely ineffective.

"Anyway, to sum up, I found all this ridiculous drivel, and I assumed that _was _the magical presence in nuclear science. It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out (but then, I was barely in my twenties) that there was indeed a magical élite and that it was taking very great pains to stay hidden; not that it needed to, since all the quacks constituted a colossal smokescreen, but anyway, it was. As soon as I realised there _was _a secret, I decided I had to know what it was; although if I'd known how difficult it would be, I'd have thought twice.

"I had to look through book after book, and mind-numbingly boring it was, too, even when I found a spell that could flick through books detecting glosses. But, obviously, in the end I found it."

"And what was it?" I said expectantly, but he was walking off into another room; and he returned with a rather shabby-looking hardback book, which he slammed down in front of me, saying, "Look."

I turned the pages, which were so thin and nasty they felt like tracing paper. From what I could see, the book contained nothing _but _glosses; it was worse than the 'Half-Blood Prince''s Potions book.

"Page 124," said Voldie.

I turned to page 124. It had a load of mathematical equations and meaningless names dotted all over it, plus an arrow pointing to a line of the printed text. This was accompanied by three little blobs.

"Er..."

"There," he said, tapping the blobs with a claw. "They may not look like it, but they're zoi-Felderutian runes. Whoever wrote this has used them phonetically instead of ideographically in an attempt to hide the meaning."

"It's working. What do they say?"

"Didn't you do any Ancient Runes, boy? It says 'Ask Elke'."

I was less than impressed. "That's _it?_"

So was he. "THAT'S IT? THAT'S IT? You must be joking. This is like finding a note in Azerbaijani in a book from Uruguay. What are the chances of some Muggle just whimsically doing a doodle and it JUST HAPPENS to be the zoi-Felderutian for 'Ask Elke'? A million to one, that's what?"

"What's an elke?" I tried to intervene, dimly aware that it was some type of mammal.

"It's someone's name, you ignorant, stay-at-home fool. Don't you know any German?"

"Yeah, cos the Dursleys really love Germans."

He stared into my head for a moment and said "Hah! You think _they're _narrow-minded. You ought to have grown up in the thirties, boy. And now, the point is, we need to find Elke."

"Why?" I said, utterly baffled, and that infuriated Voldemort and he did that little dance again where he swooped around in circles and made impotent clutching motions with his fingers.

"You, Potter, are an absolute arse. I know a grand total of ONE magician who worked in nuclear physics in the fifties, which is me. And what am I doing at present?"

"Saving the world," I said obediently.

"So we need to find this _other _person and figure out what _they're _doing."

"Someone we don't know anything about."

"We do! We can – "

"Did you have to kill Dumbledore?" I bawled, suddenly losing all patience. "He could have helped us out of this! I could have passed messages between you or something! He was about the only one powerful enough to still be here, and you killed him!"

He sneered at me in fury, but the expected shouting match failed to materialise. Instead, the anger changed to a cold, malevolent glitter. "I killed Amelia Bones, too," he said dispassionately. "She wrote a groundbreaking tractate on the space-time continuum, which you probably don't know, and she would have been an immeasurable help with the stasis spell. Only I killed her. There were times when – " and he broke off and suddenly scratched his claws down his face, leaving livid red parallel rake-marks. Then he sat and stared at the wall.

"Times when what?" I demanded.

"Nothing to do with you," he said.

"TIMES WHEN WHAT? You've nobody else to talk to here! Don't you fucking brush me off like that – "

"IT'S MY HEAD, IT'S MY THOUGHTS, I DON'T HAVE TO TELL YOU ANYTHING!" he shouted even more loudly. "There were times in the first two days when I got disoriented, when I thought perhaps I hadn't killed her at all, so I went to check at her house, and I had! THEY'RE MY BLOODY THOUGHTS, HARRY POTTER!"

"You couldn't remember if you'd killed her or not?" I said, greatly disturbed.

"NO! It's not like that! It was just – patches. Episodes of confusion. I have all my memories intac..."

"What if you forget there's a war on, and cancel the stasis spell?" I demanded.

"I WON'T FORGET! I WON'T FUCKING FORGET, YOU IGNORANT MORON! AS IF I COULD POSSIBLY FORGET WE'RE IN THE MIDDLE OF A WAR! Do you have any idea – _ha! _I've been waiting for this to happen for FIFTY-TWO YEARS!"

There was a silence while I thought about Voldemort's mental state. I was not convinced. "We really are buggered," I said.

Glare. "No, we're not. What a stupid thing to say, after everything we did – _you _did yesterday. And stop depressing me. You're a Gryffindor, you're supposed to be brave. Say, 'Yes, Voldemort. We will definitely make it, even if we perish in the attempt.'"

"I think we'll skip the perishing. D'you want some sancocho?"

"What's sancocho?" he said suspiciously, and I retired to familiarise the Dark Side's only MGB operative with Cajun cookery.

He didn't have much to say during the meal, so while I ate I started cataloguing his various phobias. He was afraid, it appeared, of nuclear fission, being alone, darkness, flying up in the air, diving underwater, death and the colour blue. In short, he was afraid of pretty much everything, and I was amazed he'd ever managed to get anything done; perhaps that was why he'd made the Death Eaters do everything for him. Not that that had worked very well either, mind you.

At that moment he suddenly froze and stared at his plate. His eyes widened horribly; his mouth slowly opened. Then he gave a scream of horror and charged off through the house, leaving cutlery tinkling across the kitchen floor.

I wondered wearily if I should go after him, and what in any case was wrong with him this time; and glanced at his plate of sancocho. Frankly, I couldn't see any lumps of plutonium in it whatsoever. It was just a load of root veg and spices and cauliflower. Had I cooked a Magic Eye sancocho? I put my head on one side, then the other, and finally noticed that the cauliflower florets looked like a vegetal huddle of pale, bulging little mushroom clouds.

Defusing these bombs was going to be a very long job.


	6. Which He Found Extremely Annoying

**Chapter 3: Which He Found Extremely Annoying**

The first visitor arrived, although I don't know when; I would like to say "he arrived on Monday" or whatever, but I had no idea what day it would have been if the stasis spell hadn't been cast. So... the first visitor arrived while I was asleep; and I was woken by his cry of "What are you _deuing?_"

I shuffled across the bedroom and peered curiously down the hall. (The house only had one storey.) Voldemort was sitting in his favourite uncomfortable chair, glaring up at a black guy whose right arm ended mid-forearm. His face was kind of scrunched as if it had been burnt or exploded, and he had the weirdest accent I'd ever heard, like the Queen's, only posher.

"...is this supposed tue help? We can't talk tue the Muggles now, cahn't reason with them!"

"As if we could ever reason with them."

"Oh, my goodness, why yeu?" the bloke wailed, gyrating in an agony of frustration. "Of all the people who could be dealing with the crisis – "

"I am the BEST one," Voldemort thundered over the top of him. "What does any bloody wizard understand about nuclear physics? You're a genius compared with most of them – "

"I beg yhaw pardon?!"

I wondered if Voldie was going to kill or Crucio him, and decided that he would have done it already if he was going to, the way that bloke was shouting at him. I trundled past them and filled the pan to boil some water. The screeching came to an abrupt halt. "Who's that?" the bloke demanded.

"That's Harry Potter," said Voldie. "So if _he _thinks I've got the right idea, then you've got no bloody right to complain."

"D'you want some tea?" I asked, yawning.

"Yes please," said Voldemort.

"Yes," said the bloke, shaken. "Listen, Lord Voldemort, you are going about this _quaite _the wrong way..."

"Oh, easy for you to say!" jeered Voldie. "You only had six bombs!"

They squabbled and chuntered all the time I was pouring the tea, conjuring up some milk, going to the toilet and getting dressed. When I finally joined them for breakfast, the Black bloke was still moaning and wringing his hand and Voldie was still cackling.

"Will you shut up?" I said irritably. "This bloke's been here for half an hour and you've still not even told me who he is."

Voldemort rolled his eyes. "This is Albert Hottie. He was the South African Ministry's plant for getting rid of their nuclear arsenal – "

"Ho!" interrupted Albert. "I _wish! _The Ministry didn't even kneuw what a nucleus was!"

"You think _you've _got problems?!" spluttered Voldemort. "Do you know how I eliminated the Lakenheath warheads?"

"No, how?"

So then he dragged me into it and spent another ten minutes boasting about how hard he was, and Albert retorted that that was nothing, because Voldie hadn't had his arm blown off by the Nats, had he? Voldie sneered that anyone who knew the first thing about explosives would never have been blown up at all, and Albert said that was good coming from someone who'd been defeated by a baby; so Voldie responded that it was him who'd cast the temporal stasis spell and we'd all be dead right now if it weren't for him, and I got fed up and said in Parseltongue, "If you don't ssstop showing off I'm going to tell him you pisssed your pantsss the other day." That shut him up.

"Hello, Albert," I said. "Nice to meet you."

Albert compressed his lips and glared at me, clearly thinking that anyone who deemed the current situation "nice" had a crap sense of proportion. I ignored him and said brightly, "What's your plan?"

Mistake. "PLAN! PLAN! THERE IS NO PLAN!" and off they went again. The gist of Albert's argument seemed to be that the best way to prevent a war was to talk to the Muggles, and we couldn't talk to them if they were statues, now could we? Voldemort (not wholly surprisingly) responded that it was impossible to reason with Muggles in the first place and the only sensible course of action was to get rid of their plutonium. I tried to interrupt again, but with no success; and the argument didn't fully end until Voldie pointed out that it was no good cancelling the stasis spell because the metaphorical button had been pushed and the missiles were literally about to leave their silos. Upon hearing this, Albert opened his mouth to present another furious argument, stopped, huffed, then suddenly slid down in his chair while expelling a tremendous sigh of defeat through his nose.

"Have you stopped arguing now?" I said wearily. "You spent ages saying we needed to find someone else, and when we do, you call him an arsehole."

Voldemort said, "I was hoping we'd find someone who knew what to do – Albert, will you shut up? – but anyone's better than nobody, I suppose. So, seeing as he's here, we have to figure out what he's going to do."

"Oh, it's ap to yeu, is it?!"

"Look," I appealed desperately, envisioning dragons munching their way through the entire population of Eastern Europe, "what were _you_ planning to do?" This question seemed a bit wide in scope, so I narrowed it down: "What were you planning to do _today?_"

Pause. "I was going to search various places for survivors – well – not survivors..."

"People who can move," I supplied.

"Yes.. well, apart from all those people at the Chinese Ministry, I haven't found any so far."

"Oho," said Voldie, satisfied. "They're all in China, are they? Might have guessed."

Albert was distinctly unimpressed: "You didn't _kneuw _that? What were _you _going to do, if you didn't even kneuw _that?!_"

"That's my business," Voldemort said loftily, "but after that, I was going to defuse a couple of bombs. Of course, if you feel it's beneath you, you needn't come along."

"Are we?" I said, surprised. "I thought all the submarines were at sea?"

Voldemort suddenly looked intolerably overbearing and smug. In a superior voice he said, "_I_ thought they were, until yesterday."

"What?" said Albert. "Wheuse submarines? The British ones?"

"Yes!" Voldie said triumphantly. "One of them's still at Faslane, in dock!"

"Why?" sputtered Albert. "Wouldn't it have been sent out at this time – "

But Voldie couldn't wait to deliver his punchline. "Ploughshare smashed the controls to bits!" he cackled, administering a deafening thwack to Albert's thigh, and they both fell about laughing for around ten minutes. I watched, mystified, as they hooted and rejoiced and punched either other in the ribs, howling "Good old Ploughshare!" and "Let's hear it for the hippies!"

Eventually I went and made them a second cup of tea each, and by the time it was brewed they were discussing the best course of action quite amicably; they agreed to get on with their own private searches and to rendezvous "tomorrow" at Faslane, and parted with unexpectedly good wishes. I was speechless, and cooked breakfast to keep myself sane.

I cooked some baked beans, fried mushrooms and tomatoes; wondered how it could be that World War III had started and I'd run away from school with Voldemort, yet I seemed to be still here, and was eating and thinking and functioning, and had formed a rapport of sorts with the scaly one, even. I wasn't sure whether this was actually a good outcome; I started to mull it over, but at that moment Voldie interrupted me by rapping me on the head with a spoon.

"OW," I said.

"Wimp. Right, let us review our plans for the day. We're going to look at the prophecies; agreed?"

"Do we have to?" I said unenthusiastically, chasing mushrooms round the pan.

"We don't _have _to," he said, a pinch of impatience swirling round in his voice, "but, as I say, I think it would _help_."

"I don't think it would help," I muttered.

"You don't think AT ALL."

I stabbed at a tomato, watched it explode in a splat of red guts. I thought about how much I would like to kill Voldemort, and silently accepted that the option was not available. I would have to get on with him if a war was to be avoided, the same way he would have to get on with Albert, and the Americans would have to coexist with the Russians. I flipped half the food onto his plate, deposited it in front of him and said as emotionlessly as possible, "All right. We'll go and look at prophecies."

Voldemort stared at me for a bit with his knife and fork pointing, startled, at the ceiling, and displayed a hitherto unsuspected capacity for tact. "We don't necessarily have to go to the British Ministry," he conceded gruffly.

"Where are we going, then?"

"Any of them will do. BUT NOT AMERICA! I AM NOT GOING TO AMERICA!" he shouted, banging his fork on the breakfast bar and rattling his plate. "DON'T TRY TO MAKE ME, BOY! YOU'LL NEVER GET ME THERE!"

Riiight. I sat down next to him cautiously and started on my own breakfast. "But the stuff we want's got to be in English, hasn't it?"

"A lot of countries use English in their records. You'd be surprised how many. We can go to Australia, NZ, India, Pakistan... any country where quite a lot of the population speaks English, basically."

"OK," I munched doubtfully. "Well, if you've been there before, then I suppose we should go to one where you know where everything is."

"India, then. I'll Apparate us there. You don't mind, do y-?"

"OH NO, NOT YOUR SODDING APPARITION AGAIN!"

"YOU'RE SUCH A WIMP!" he shouted back. "ANYONE YOUR AGE OUGHT TO BE ABLE TO BLOODY APPARATE!"

"How fucking far is it to India?" I demanded, waving a mushroom around on the end of my fork.

"Just a few thousand miles," he said sweetly.

"Oh, god," I groaned. "I hope you Splinch your backside."

"I haven't Splinched myself since I was seventeen, and I'm delighted that you want me to be _incapacitated _so that I _can't defuse the bombs_," he sneered coldly.

"Yeah, because you're really doing this out of love for humankind!"

"Fuck humankind! It was them that created this mess in the first place..."

Thus, later, still arguing, did we depart unto Mumbai.

000

In India it was not, of course, early morning, but midday. Having forgotten to make arrangements for this, we Apparated into such heat that my body attempted to expel its entire supply of liquid in a tidal wave of sweat. I vomited horribly, while Voldemort staggered, swore, and leaned on my back to get his balance. This did not improve my mood.

We were in a courtyard garden, a square one surrounded on all sides by a kind of cloister; it was packed with Indian wizards and witches, all motionless. Voldemort cast a Cooling Charm and helped me into the shade of the arches, where he mopped his forehead and I picked chunks of food off my trainers.

"Fine," he said crisply, "I forgot it was hot over here. Too bad. The door's that astonishing twiddly thing that looks as if someone threw gilded porridge over it."

I glanced at the cynosure of his attention. "They did go a bit overboard," I agreed. "Is it trapped?"

"I don't think so. It is guarded, but with any luck the guard's frozen."

He strode briskly off through the maze of frozen Indians in the courtyard, occasionally attacked by a horizontal dupatta or sari that had been caught in mid-air when the stasis spell came into effect. I flicked a bit of carrot aside and trundled wearily after him.

The golden gates were huge, ornate and flanked by silver elephants. Voldemort walked through them into a long, dark marble hallway, then stood still and waited. I stood next to him in puzzlement for several seconds, and was just opening my mouth to ask what was happening when an enormous flying eyeball popped up in front of my face.

"Aaagh!" I yelped out of reflex, jerking away from the horrible thing. It followed me, staring into my eyes; it made a few tweeting noises to itself and waved its tentacles. To my right I could hear Voldemort sniggering.

"Oh yes, this is so funny," I snarled. "Ugh! What is it?"

"I told you this place had a guard," he said mildly. "I don't think it'll be very pleased when it sees me, though."

"Some guard," I muttered as it floated serenely up to Voldemort, peered into his eyes and suddenly stopped dead in mid-air. It tweeted again in quiet perturbation, peered some more and sailed off down the hall, tentacles bobbing.

"Right, come on," Voldemort said briskly. "We'll follow it to whoever's in charge," and he took off yet again at 90mph. I wished he hadn't got such long legs.

"What if it just leads us into a trap?" I grumbled. "You should probably AK it now."

"What?!" he said, shocked. "But it's so cute!"

Voldemort: kills babies, likes flying tentacular eyeballs. I followed the pretty pair, muttering to myself.

We progressed down a long dark corridor, whose walls were of a wood that looked like mahogany, and squeezed between various witches and wizards who were blocking the doors. Voldemort gave me a few nasty looks when this happened, presumably because my presence was preventing his simply blasting the Indians to bits. I glared right back at him; if he felt it was beneath his dignity to be wodged between minor officials, well, that was his problem.

At last we were disgorged into an equally dark office, clad this time with slate, in which the desks and shelves were attended by frozen staff who showed no sign whatsoever of being able to give an order. The eyeball floated into the centre of the room, have a high, trilling call, and abruptly vanished. Voldemort made an amusingly infuriated noise.

"Bugger," he muttered. "I suppose we'll just have to try to sneak into the archives. Evidently there's nobody left here at..."

"Can I help you?" said a very posh voice from beside his left elbow. He yelped and flailed his arm around; I cast Lumos in time to reveal a cross-legged, disdainful-looking house-elf, who, like the eyeball, was bobbing up and down in mid-air.

"Can I help you, sir?" she repeated, without bothering to stop her magical quill writing on a small notepad. She was dressed in a sari and shalwar kameez, so I supposed she must be a fairly non-traditional house-elf. The eyeball peeped over her left shoulder as if afraid we might attack.

"Hello, I'm Harry and that's You-Know-Who," I informed her. "What's your name?"

"I am Lakshmi Bhattacharya, seniorrr undersecrrretary to the Ministerrr of Magic," she said distantly. She was fantastic at rolling her Rs. "May I be of assistance? The Minister is indisposed at prrresent."

Voldie, recovering to some degree, barked, "A nuclear war has started and I've cast a temporal stasis spell, which is why your Minister is indisposed. Was the Indian Ministry doing anything to stop it?"

"What is 'nuclear'?" Lakshmi demanded.

"There goes that, then," said Voldemort.

Becoming intrigued, I asked, "Do you know a British house-elf called Dobby?"

Lakshmi looked delighted and rather impressed. "Ah, you know the password. Our colleague is orrrganising the elves in Britain, using the codename 'Dhobi'. And you must be Harry Poe-tar."

"That's me," I affirmed while Voldemort stared at me as if I'd turned myself into a lump of blue cheese.

"I am honoured to meet you, sir. Feel free to browse the Ministry archives," Lakshmi said casually, and a door suddenly appeared in the opposite wall as she went back to her notes, looking completely unconcerned with everything that had happened. I said "Thank you," and hastily pulled Voldie through the door before he could do anything to ruin it.

We walked down a corridor for some time before he said, "I hate you, Potter, and your bloody good luck."

The Indian Ministry had a very good library, illuminated by tiny, pink winged elephants with flames coming out of their mouths; there was also a sign saying PERSONS BRINGING DURIAN INTO THE LIBRARY WILL BE FED TO THE THREE-HEADED DOG, but once you'd got over that it was pretty straightforward. Voldemort marched briskly down the immense central walkway and set off down one of the side aisles.

"Hey," I shouted in vain, running after him. "Hang on, Voldie. What doI _do?"_

"Just muck about," he said casually, his robes sweeping imperiously away from me. Unfair; I didn't have any robes to sweep. I shouted after him, with malice aforethought, "But I'll get lost and you won't be able to find me."

That did it. He jumped, looked around nervously and took in the size of the library. Then he said, "Stay close to me, then. But don't disturb me when I'm in deep thought."

"And if I see that vanishing blue person again?"

"Tell me straight away."

With that, he hovered along to his final destination and unloaded a shitload of books from the section helpfully labelled "Doomsday".

At the point there was very little for me to do. I walked the length of the library looking for blue persons and three-headed dogs, but alas, or hallelujah, there was none. Then I looked for books that I might find interesting, but came up with a similar sum; the subjects were so specialised that just looking at the titles made me cry. I wandered aimlessly along to a little fountain, which of course was frozen in mid-air, and sat down on the marble edge. A small amount of water liberated itself and fell into the pool with a splash. Beyond that there was silence.

After a while the flying eyeball trundled out from behind a bookcase and came to a shocked halt, tentacles drifting gracefully, as it saw me sitting there. "Hello, eyeball," I said wearily, and it purred suspiciously and bobbed round me in a circle as if to make sure I wasn't putting soap in the fountain.

"Cheeeeeeep," it said dolefully when it saw that I was innocent.

"Tell me about it," I grumbled.


	7. Chapter 3b

_**Chapter 3b**_

After three hours or so, when I had resorted to doing Quidditch exercises in the central aisle, an extremely grumpy Voldemort arrived and announced, "Fucking Nostradamus."

"What's that when it's at home?"

"Who? Nostradamus? A mean-spirited, sadistic arsehole. How I hate the bastard."

"What's he done?"

"He made a stupid prophecy," Voldie said, and suddenly raised his wand and blasted down the bookcases. They fell to the floor in rows like dominoes, books exploding outwards all across the library, and we just kind of stood there looking at them until he put them right with a snap of his wand and said, "Do you have any idea of the effect that kind of thing has on an eleven-year-old? The world is going to end in 1999, he said. 'And from the sky will come the great king of terror.' I read that in 1940. I spent every night praying that I would die before I was seventy-two. But I didn't and now look, it's fucking happening."

I stared at him is dismay and started slowly edging away, feeling only a sense of maudlin wonderment at the way everything managed to go wrong for me. Here I was stuck at the end of the world with an ingenious madman, and he couldn't even remember _what frigging year it was_. Brilliant. "What are you doing?" he barked, and I shouted, "IT'S NOT 1999, VOLDIE!"

He doubled up laughing, slapped his thighs, hooted for a while and then suddenly plucked me off the floor and spun me round a few times. While I was recovering from the shock of this he put me down, hugged me warmly and said "Ooooooooh, Harry. It's all so simple for you. I'm glad I've got you here."

"Right."

"You don't know how lucky you are," he said, sitting down on the floor and starting to cry. "But you're right, don't you see? He said July 1999, and it _isn't _July 1999! It's _June 1997! _So he got it WRONG!" he exulted, hurling his arms out like a scarecrow and laughing and crying at the same time.

Perhaps this sounds like an unbelievable wuss-out, but I was quite frightened. In my experience, a ranting Voldemort was generally A Very Bad Thing. A crying Voldemort seemed, if anything, worse. Still, it seemed I'd better do something, so I gritted my teeth and sat down next to him. I patted his back and said "Yes, that's right. Don't worry," privately sending a resentful complaint up to God. Or should that be Gods? Perhaps I should complain to the Hindu gods; there were a lot more of them, after all.

Anyway, in a sob-caesura I said "We should probably go back home now," and he said "Yes, yes, sorry," and stood up again.

"D'you want to ask that house-elf anything?" I said reluctantly. I didn't really want to stay here any longer in case he went bonkers again, but on the other hand, I _really _didn't want to go back to Wales and then come back again because he'd forgotten something. "At least she doesn't scream like Albert."

"True," he concurred fervently. "All right. D'you remember her name?"

"Er... Lakshmi Bhattacharya?"

"Yes?" the distant voice said from just above my head, accompanied by a _crack _that made Voldemort start violently and elbow me in the head. His elbows, if you recall, are extremely pointy. Through the tears and agony I heard him demand, "Do you _have _to pop up every time like a crumpet from a well-sprung toaster?"

"What is 'crumpet'?" Lakshmi said curiously.

"Harry is, but never mind that. If anything arises, I want to be able to get in touch with me..." and they debated the best method of achieving this and finally decided that Lakshmi should come back to Wales with us and have a look at the house; and accordingly I was Apparated mercilessly homewards and sent to draw water from the stream while Voldie and Lakshmi discussed Ministry politics in the kitchen. I hobbled into the garden and stared wonderingly into the stream as I sank the bucket; here I was, not only a lackey of Voldemort, but the house-elf of a house-elf. I'd known it would be difficult becoming an Auror or a professional Quidditch player, but never had I foreseen _this _as my future role in life. Trelawney would have been delighted, I thought as I withdrew the bucket, which intriguingly left a bucket-shaped hole in the stream.

I made tea for Voldemort and Lakshmi while he attempted to explain concepts such as atomic structure and chain reaction (most of which were news to me, since I'd never done high school science) and got it across to her that a war was quite important, so much so, indeed, that she might have to leave India, and even to temporarily desist completing the entire Ministry's unfinished paperwork. It appeared that even emancipated house-elves were workaholics. Voldemort generously offered to provide my catering services, but Lakshmi declined, saying she had to double-check the list of Squibs born in 1986 before filing it; so she vanished back to India and I made toasted sandwiches for me and the maniac. I expected him to provide conversation of some sort; instead, he gobbled down his butties with impressive speed and delicacy, leapt to his feet, clapped his hands and said "I'm off for a bath. You're all right on your own, aren't you?"

I blinked. "Yes, fine. – How are you going to have a bath?"

He looked at me as if I were wearing a turban made of bananas. "Walk into the bathroom, close the door, take my robes off, fill the bath..."

"How are you going to fill the bath if the taps don't work?" I interrupted.

"Aguamenti."

"Oh. Yeah. How are you going to drain the water away afterwards?"

"Evanesco," he said patiently.

"Oh. Good idea," I said, feeling silly, and he swept away on his enormously long legs, of which I was beginning to feel slightly envious. I couldn't sweep; I could only stump about in my jeans. I tied a tea towel round my waist and tried to sweep, but it didn't work. I got on with the washing-up and wondered what we would be doing with Albert the next day. My wonderings did not extend very far, because I knew almost nothing about anything except that we would be getting bombs out of a submarine called Trident. This gave me a feeling of vague irritation, which, as I dried the knives, finally condensed into a totally unfamiliar desire for intellectual pabulum.

"Voldo," I called, and listened. No response. I walked down the hallway and saw that the bathroom was empty; listening at his bedroom door, I was rewarded by a strong pong of seaweed bubble-bath, plus happy singing. I knocked on the door and he shouted, "Yes?"

"I still don't know anything about nuclear stuff."

"It's all right."

"I meant, can I read your books?"

"Which books?" his voice said immediately, perking up at the magic word; really, he was as bad as Hermione. A couple of seconds later he went sweeping into the dining area – yes, still sweeping, even though he was wearing a maroon terry-towelling dressing gown – and shouted, "There's no point in your wading through these. Small print, impenetrable terminology, no diagrams; even I find them boring. Here – " and my arms were suddenly laden with _Unclear Physics: A Layman's Guide To Splitting The Atom _and _It's Not Nuclear Physics!... Oh, It Is: Nukes For Dummies. _Then he found me a diagram of a Tornado plane and a photocopied political pamphlet dated 1984, and various things about cultural legacy and climatology and stuff like that, and soon there was this vast pile of books in front of me and I was sat there speechless while he rattled on about the poor quality of the German translation. Then he finally buggered off to polish his head and I was left to wade haplessly through this cataract of knowledge. Thanks, Voldie.

Actually, as I soon discovered, this was rather a good thing for him to have done. On reading the different books I quickly discovered that (a) they didn't agree with Voldemort, and (b) they didn't agree with each other. Some mentioned EMP and some didn't; some insisted the whole planet would be rendered uninhabitable by a nuclear war, while others reckoned the prognosis had been exaggerated; some referred to a nuclear arsenal as a "deterrent" and others said that was stupid. Well. That had made me a lot more confused than I was when I'd started. It also suggested that Voldie might be wrong. Wonderful.

Eventually he bounced back in and said eagerly "Well? What do you think?"

I've said it before, but I shall reiterate: the war had changed his personality completely. Not that that concerned me at the time; I was grappling with the horrors of climatology. Looking up from the book, I said with total incomprehension, "This bloke says there wouldn't be a nuclear winter."

"Really? Which one is it? If it's _Unclear Physics_ then that's because it was published in the Seventies, dear."

"No, no, um, it's General Ripper's _How We Will Win The War We Do Not Want."_

"Oh. Him. Voldemort's Life Lessons No. 1," said Voldemort. "Soldiers make rubbish environmentalists."

"What are the rest of Voldemort's Life Lessons?" I said, intrigued.

"No. 2: looks aren't everything. No. 3: don't kill babies. Anything else?"

"Er, what's unilateral disarmy – armamy - "

"Oh, no, no, skip the politics."

"Right."

"No use to us now. _Would _have been useful," he admitted, "if I'd got my backside in gear; but I didn't. Mind you, neither did anybody else. People's fatalism when it comes to the end of the world is really astonishing. They seem to have decided to just leave the whole thing to chance... I would say everyone else made this mess and dumped us in it," he fumed, "but in fact I was just as idiotic as they were. Worse, in fact."

The conversation was taking a very depressing turn. I didn't want a self-flagellating Voldemort. I cast about for a way to change the subject.

"Could the magical world survive the blast?" I brooded. "Even if all the Muggles got killed?"

This, unbeknown to me, was the magic question.

"Could they," said Voldemort, brightening and clapping his hands together. "_Could _they. Aha, now there's an interesting question, boy. The answer is, they _could _survive it very easily if they (1) took Muggle weaponry seriously," he said, counting on his fingers, "(2) learnt a few basic facts about nuclear physics, and (3) cast the fairly elementary spells and wards needed to protect themselves from the various effects of the bomb, which would depend on where they were. So, tell me, Harry, could the magical world survive the blast?"

"No," I said promptly.

"Got it in one. Well done."

"What are the elementary spells and wards?" I wanted to know.

"Depends where you are, doesn't it? And the strength of the bomb. If they were very close to the hypocentre they'd be buggered, because the temperature might reach, say, fifty million degrees."

"Oh."

"Yep."

"Isn't there any charm that would work? A Flame-Freezing Charm?"

"...is effective against temperatures up to about thirty thousand degrees."

"But _you _could," I argued, and he gave me a pitying smile.

"Oh, Harry. If only I were as powerful as you seem to think I am."

I gurned and flicked him the V, and he sniggered.

"All right, a survival pack if you weren't near the hypocentre. A Shielding Charm would protect you from the blast, if it was strong enough. Impediment Jinx would work on shrapnel and suchlike; you'd need to turn it into a ward, of course. Bubble-Head Charm to keep a supply of oxygen. Flame-Freezing Charms and suchlike only work in an actual conflagration, so outside you'd need something to guard against thermal radiation. Then afterwards there would be fallout, so they'd have to cast anti-ionic radiation charms, which are exceedingly simple but would most likely be the biggest problem of the lot, because you need to understand a few basic facts about radiation in order to cast them; oh, and they're classed as Dark spells, naturally."

I nodded obediently for a while, then finally registered that last sentence and said "Er – why are anti-radiation spells considered Dark?"

"Because I invented them."

"_You?_"

"Who else?" he said.

"Can I ask you something? With all this stuff that you've done, why did you become a Dark Lord?"

He laughed for ages, until I got irritated and said "No, really! Why? Yeah, laugh, I'm glad you think it's funny."

"Enough of your impudence, boy."

"Well, why, though?"

He batted his eyelids at me, not having lashes, and said "Perhaps I wanted something to take my mind off radiophobia."

"You're doing all right at the moment."

"Yes," he said doubtfully, and a ripple of worry crossed the surface of his face; but then he shouted cheerfully, "Oh, what's the use of protecting the witzies? They don't understand the first thing about the risks or how to calculate them, so they would almost certainly cast the wrong spells anyway. They would all die from infra-red burns, or something equally ridiculous."

Really, he was such a miserable git. "How would you do it, then?" I challenged. "If you were in charge."

He looked at me with unexpected glee and said hopefully, "Are we playing Harry And Voldemort, The Ministers Of Magic?"

"Yes," I said firmly.

"Excellent!" he enthused, clapping his hands and Summoning a piece of paper and a quill, with which he drew a rough map of Britain. He headed this, "PROTECT AND SURVIVE (Magical version)".

"Right," he said. "We find someone intelligent with good literary skills..."

"Hermione," I put in.

"We get Hermione to draw public safety leaflets, and... is that the Muggle genius? These leaflets do have to be understandable to complete morons, you know."

"She's not a Muggle, she's Muggle-born. I'll get Ron to proofread," I decided. "They'll do it all right between them."

"Right. First we have to explain what a nuclear war is, because when they see the word 'war' they'll expect it to go on for six years."

"Oh. OK, 'All the Muggle cities will be destroyed within seconds'..."

"Within a millisecond of impact, actually, Harry."

"How long _is_ a millisecond?"

"True. 'A massive explosion will destroy the Muggle cities within seconds. The effects of the explosion will remain deadly for at least a month.' So, anyone living in a city has to clear out immediately. I'll send Lucius to tell the Ministry to shift itself, there's no earthly reason why it should be in London, everyone Apparates or Floos there anyway..."

"Where do the evacuated people live? Hogsmeade?"

"They wouldn't fit," said Voldemort, who was happily scribbling out London, Manchester and Glasgow. "We'll just tell them to find a new place in the country. Take over Muggle houses. _What? _They're all going to die anyway! Oh, all right, we'll find them _empty _Muggle houses, all right? I'll send Wormtail to find them, the rats always know. Next, we _have _to shift St. Mungo's! I have no idea what they were smoking when they decided to put the _hospital _in bloody Central London, which is 100 certain to be the first place to be bombed in any war."

He drew in a new hospital in the Welsh Mountains, then sighed dispiritedly, "Now we have to try to explain to them what thermal radiation is."

I thought. "It makes you glow in the dark."

"_Pardon? _– That's _ionising_ radiation, Potter. I'm on about _thermal _radiation. X-rays. Ultraviolet. Infra-red. _Light! _Well, admittedly, X-rays and gamma rays are ionising too, but..." Blah.

This went completely over my head apart from the bit about ultraviolet, which I was vaguely aware meant UV. "It gives you cancer."

"That's in _small _doses, Potter, over a long period of time. This would be a single huge dose, like incredibly powerful sunburn, since the exploding bomb is ten-to-the-power-of-sixteen times brighter than the sun."

"OK, say that."

"Oh. – It's all so simple for you, isn't it?"

"Well, you just _said _it!"

"Fine, fine. So, we have to find an impossibly patient person to tell the massed morons about thermal radiation..."

"Professor Lupin," I said.

"You must really hate him. All right, Professor Lupin explains that when a nuclear bomb explodes it gives off a very bright flash of light that can cause third-degree burns twenty miles away... well, probably more like seven or eight miles in this day and age, actually. Anyway, they must stay inside their houses with the shutters closed, unless they want their family members to ignite like flashbulbs." Voldemort drew a little Hogwarts in the Highlands and added the notation _Lupin_. "Then he teaches them an Invisibility Charm. Well. He teaches the adults, anyway. Can you cast one?"

"No, we haven't done that yet."

"Oh, sod," he sighed, picturing the entire younger generation going up in smoke.

"I've got an Invisibility Cloak anyway."

"Well, you can't hide the whole witzy population of Great Britain under it... Of course, provided we get everyone more than ten miles from the nearest town, we won't need anything anyway. I don't think it would hurt to show it to them, though, do you?"

"Er."

"Quite. So then poor Professor Lupin must teach it to our idiotic brethren."

"He won't mind. He's had worse jobs."

"Really? Anyway, he explains infra-red, he explains EMP... well, actually, he doesn't..."

"What's EMP?"

"Electro-Magnetic Pulse. We'll skip that. Witzies don't use electrical equipment anyway. Theoretically it might affect our ability to use magic, since magic interferes with electricity and vice versa and the EMP would be much greater than anything we'd experienced before. But I've no idea and there's no way of finding out, apart from having a war."

"Better not, then."

"Funnily enough, no."

"It seems odd that just when we'd need magic most, we might find out it had vanished."

Voldie showed all his teeth and said "I think you may have summed up every civil defence scheme ever. To quote that horrendous line from I forget where, 'Unforeseen effects of the war should be assumed to equal or exceed predicted effects'."

"Right."

"I love your face. Ha ha! You look as if you're revising for a three-hour Arithmancy test."

"I don't do Arithmancy."

"It shows. Never mind. Where were we?"

"EMP."

"Yes, yes, we skip that. All right, your teacher friend explains to the common fools about the blast, and tells them to strengthen their foundations and open their windows. – Do they understand bombs, d'you think?"

"They must do, cos they've got Dungbombs, haven't they? Hey," I said, experiencing a sudden revelation, "is it possible to stick a radiation charm in a hat?"

"In a hat! Ha! Whatever gave you that idea?"

"Fred and George Weasley do Shielding Hats! The Ministry buys them."

"Fred and George – would they own the pink flashing shop in Diagon Alley?" he said with an expression of the deepest distaste.

"That's them!" I said enthusiastically.

"Hm... we'll draw a veil over that. In any case, a Lead Shield Charm would work very badly, but a Röntgen Charm would be a handy thing to have in, oh, a wristband."

"Right, Fred and George make Ready Röntgen Wristbands," I decided.

"As long as they don't spell 'wristband' with an R."

"OK."

"And we could put little sirens in them that'll sound when the bomb drops. So, Lupin hands out wristbands and then tries to explain to them about ionising radiation... dear god, we've done all this planning and we haven't even got to radiation yet."

We both looked at the map. Voldemort decisively relocated Weasley's Wizard Wheezes to Hogsmeade, adding a note that read, _Pink flashing wristbands._

"So, we have to tell them what radiation _is_."

"Invisible stuff that kills you," I suggested.

"I like your way with words, boy. All right, then we explain to them that the deadly rays can't penetrate a Shielding Charm to a two-inch lead equivalent. They understand solid things, don't they, boy? Lead, lead is dense, the invisible killer rays (and particles, but we'll skip that) can't get through two inches of lead... you think?"

"I'd go with that."

"So he teaches them how to cast a lead shield. – You can, can't you?"

"Er."

Protect And Survive (Magical version) was temporarily aborted while Voldie made me wave my wand and chant "_Protego Plumbum_". After a while a silvery Harry-shaped shield popped into existence, and he was satisfied.

"You're a good boy, Harry. You'll do all right. Are you going to learn some physics?"

"Er, I'd never really thought about it."

"I'd noticed. All right, Professor Lupin explains to them about radiation, and then... There's no need to warn them about the initial emission," he noted, "because everyone close enough to catch a dose would be incinerated. So it's the fallout they've got to watch out for."

"What _is _fallout?" I said, feeling stupid.

"Literally stuff that falls from the sky after the bombs drop. Rain, snow, soot, all of which are highly radioactive and have to be avoided for a month. Well, except for Wormtail, he can just turn into a rat. So they stay indoors for a month, existing on a stockpile of clean food and water... well, the Muggles always reckoned at least a month, but perhaps they were assuming it just wasn't feasible to stay underground for much longer... oh, well, anyway," he decided, chucking the pencil down, "that would keep the witzies alive until horrific climate change arrived, at which point we would all die except me; and frankly I think even I'd commit suicide at that point."

"Oh, well."

"Yes. We did a lot better than the Muggle government."

"Which built the bombs in the first place."

"There you go. I've never been terribly impressed with Muggle governments."

"Apart from insane dictators?"

"Potter, they all _die_."

That stymied me completely. Like most people, I thought of mortality as unfortunate, but I couldn't quite see how it could be considered a personal failing; the problem immediately arose that such a rule would render all life-forms, ever, to be failures. Except him; Voldemort: Flight From Death. Obsession could be taken no further.

"People do die, you know," I said. "Even Salazar Slytherin."

"Yes," he nodded, his expression suggesting that he considered himself a vast improvement on that inferior prototype.

000

I wouldn't say I had nightmares; not nightmares, quite. My dreams, however, were growing progressively more persistent; they were like deep water, very cold and black and wearying, and in the middle of the "night" I was woken up by something, someone, clutching at my arm and fingers scrabbling at my face. I was so exhausted and brain-dead that none of this made sense.

"Boy – I never thanked you, boy. I have to tell you, to let you know that you saved me."

My battery was completely flat. I let out a groan that sounded as if it came from a gearbox rather than a human.

"I would never have made it, Harry. I would never have managed to deal with the Eighties. I wasted all this time hating you. You forgive me, don't you, Harry? You forgive me?"

"Yes, yes," I said. I would have forgiven him anything just then as long as he'd let me get to sleep; hell, I would have forgiven him for murdering my own parents – hang on.

"It would have killed me. I'd be dead, boy, and I can't face it if this goes wrong and I never told you. You're a good boy, Harry."

By this time I'd vaguely figured out that he was gibbering about something, and I felt kind of sorry for him. I also felt vindictively delighted; embarrassed and uncomfortable; and totally unnerved. Even if Voldemort was weeping over you and begging your forgiveness, it wasn't pleasant to wake from a nightmare to find him clutching at your face. He looked like some kind of pervert.

The emotions initiated combat. Weariness triumphed. "Lord – Voldie – why don't you come in here with me and I'll keep you warm," I slurred, barely even aware of what I was saying. Ten seconds later I had a traumatised, shivering Voldemort in bed with me, but fortunately he had finally shut up. I think he said something else as well a minute or two later, but I'd already slid back into the void.


	8. A Comedy In A Foreign Language

**Chapter 4: A Comedy In A Foreign Language**

In the morning I woke suddenly and decisively. I knew that I had fallen asleep with Voldemort and that he had crept quietly off to his own room some hours later, although I wasn't sure precisely how I knew that; and I was entirely alert and furiously angry. I jumped out of bed, feeling that I had to do _something _or I would start punching walls. I went outside.

The garden was serene and beautiful. Leaning against the house was a little shack full of big fat logs. Next to that was a nice sharp axe. I grabbed the axe and started chopping the logs into smaller and smaller pieces.

After about half an hour I admitted to myself that I wasn't angry. I was afraid. I couldn't kill Voldemort, I realised; I couldn't kill him because he didn't exist any more. He had vanished and been replaced by his wibbling, radiophobic identical twin, and not only did it seem rather unfair to kill such a pathetic creature, but I needed him to save the world.

Now I was scared that I would start to like him. I was really pretty good at liking people. Case in point: Sirius; I'd begged to move in with him about ten minutes after finding out he wasn't really a mass murderer. So now, if the unthinkable occurred and I changed my mind about Voldemort...

I gave one last savage, frightened chop, then laid down the axe and looked around me. Countless chips of wood were poised, immobile, in mid-air, having flown just beyond the perimeter of my personal time-bubble. I walked up to them, and they fell to the ground. I looked at my shadow; it reached only as far as the thorax and then petered out.

Perhaps there was no point in killing Voldemort, I thought dispiritedly. This world we were in was only half real anyway.

000

"Have you finished chopping enough kindling to last us the next six months?" a pile of huge books asked in a preoccupied tone as I entered the kitchen. "If you remember, I said I'd show Albert round Faslane once he's finished searching various Ministries for animate people."

"Where's Faslane?" I said wearily, bracing myself for the news that it was in Australia.

"North-west of Glasgow."

"Oh," I said, surprised.

"We won't need anything. Well, except plans of the subs, that is, and I've got those... Hell, it won't even be all that cold. Usually a terrible wind off the sea up there."

"Have you been there before?"

"Loads of times."

"Right," I said, feeling otherwise somewhat speechless. "I'll make us some toast."

_Atom And The Ants: The Bombs That Dwarf Humankind_ lowered itself just enough to ask hopefully, "Can I have porridge? Salted porridge."

"Don't be disgusting."

"If we're going there I'll need more than toast."

"Well, you're not having _that _stuff. Cook it yourself."

"That's the point. I _can't!_"

"Well, _I_ won't!"

We argued away, and he sulked horribly while eating cornflakes, then donned a purple woolly scarf and matching mittens and Apparated to Scotland. This was much less traumatic than going to India; also, obviously, much colder. We appeared on another endless stretch of concrete, this one framed between green fells, aggressively hideous government buildings and twinkling sea. I looked around with great interest. This was the first time I had ever been to the seaside; and to be honest, considering the state of the average British beach, it was probably a much more enjoyable experience than Cleethorpes or Skegness. There wasn't much of a smell, although I did detect the whiff of salt on the air, and the seagulls, plus droppings, were frozen in mid-air; but it was still the sea and I was happy.

Voldemort looked around, shivered and tightened his scarf. I didn't know why; I thought the place was quite nice. Well, as nuclear bases go.

"Well," he said after casting a few non-verbal, glowing spells, "Albert's not here yet, which is typical. Shall we walk up and down the harbour?"

"We could play I Spy."

"I spy with my little eye, something beginning with D," said Voldemort.

"Doomsday," I said immediately.

"Idiot. You can't _see _Doomsday! I was thinking of the docks."

"Oh. That's not very depressing, for you."

"I was TRYING to be CHEERFUL!" he shouted, marching off along the harbour.

"You were doing really well, well done. – Why _is _the submarine still in dock?" I said with a feeling of woolly perplexity as I ran to catch up with him.

"Because Ploughshare bashed it to pieces," said Voldemort, and he suddenly stopped looking sulky and started cackling again.

"What _are _Ploughshare?"

"Lesbian hippies who smash up ordnance. It's because of that line in the Bible, I forget which chapter and verse, 'and thou shalt beat swords into ploughshares'. They take it quite literally." More cackling. "It's not fair to call them hippies, really. What do they call them now, boy? Crusties?"

"Er," I said, dodging an airborne seagull turd, which fell to the concrete with a plop. (Since I spent ten months of the year in a magical boarding school, I was not terribly cognisant with contemporary musical movements.)

"Well, they're the only people who've done anything useful so far, anyway. Just think, all that peace and love stuff... I much prefer the kind of peace and love that involves rampant vandalism, don't you?"

"I thought you would," I concurred. "Can the sub fire its missiles if it's in dock?"

"Don't know. They might have damaged other bits of it as well. Or the navy might have disarmed it while it was being repaired... That was a very sensible question, by the way. Are you sure you feel all right?"

"Eff off," I was just starting to say when Albert appeared a foot in front of me with a quiet _pop _and I barged straight into him. We both stood poised in mid-air for a moment, arms flailing, then fell over in slow motion and crashed onto the concrete. There followed a long session of separating my limbs from Albert's, during which Voldie stood next to us doing nothing to help and laughing so heartily he was practically doubled over. I reflected that, had I met him only two minutes ago, this quintessence of Voldemoric behaviour would still have left me with an excellent grasp of his character.

"Well, that was very funny," he said at last when we'd disengaged ourselves. "But I suppose we'd better get down to business now. All right, Albert?"

"I am quaite well, thank you," Albert said with colossal dignity, despite the fact that he was wearing an enormous fake-fur coat and looked like a polar bear. It matched his crinkly white hair. "How is yeur research progressing?"

"Very well, thanks," Voldemort lied. "What did all the people in China say about me?"

"That they would laike to kill yeu."

Over Albert's shoulder I saw that Ploughshare had graffitied some of the buildings; a skull leered at me like the Dark Mark. Clear capitals underneath read, NO TO NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST! NO TO DEATH.

Well. That set the tone very nicely. We walked in silence down an incredibly long dock... road... thing that seemed to get longer and longer as we advanced. Vast cranes loomed over the glinting sea like herons waiting to snap us up with their giant beaks.

WAR SUICIDE, read the graffiti this time.

Then – there is no really way to put this – I was confronted by a horribly ugly grey machine rearing its sinister head out of the water. If asked previously, I would have said I had no particular preconceptions about submarines; upon actually _seeing _one I discovered a reservoir of deep antipathy towards what was essentially a machine for killing people. Films about World War II scrolled through my head. _Über Periskop; Ünter Periskop. _I no longer considered Faslane quite nice as nuclear bases go. I waited for Voldie to collapse in a heap, but he just walked straight on past; and we went past the little (little!) grey Dutch subs and all the way to the black creature hanging from the cranes, dead, like a corpse in a gibbet.

"Heo," Albert said when he saw which way we were heading. "So they've got it eout of the drink? Well. Doesn't make a great deal of difference."

"No, it doesn't," Voldemort said with ominous calm, nestling into his scarf. "Because I am _not going inside it_, no matter what."

"What?!"

"What?!" demanded Voldie.

"Well, if yeu won't go inside it, then yeu can't – !"

Voldie ignored him completely, raised his wand and drew the complex neon lights that rendered the side of the sub transparent. Albert wisely shut up during this sequence to avoid causing some kind of horrible invisibility-related accident, but as soon as the procedure was complete he burst out, "YEU'RE SEU BLOODY NEUROTIC. YEU'D WALK FAIV MAILS TO AVOID GEUING UNDER A LEDDER. AND WHEN ALL THIS IS AT STAKE. YEU'RE QUAITE INSANE."

Voldemort shouted a lot of things back at him (e.g. "YOU'RE SUCH A BITCH. YOU KNOW I'VE GOT CLAUSTROPHOBIA"), but he didn't Crucio him or anything, so I just studied the inside of the sub. This was frankly dismaying: there were a million little offices inside, all of which looked like the inside of a waste paper basket. I hoped it was just the Ploughshare sortie that had caused this effect, but suspected the condition was permanent; God only knew what state the bombs were in. I wondered if we would all die. The graffiti this time said RECYCLE TRIDENT!

"...and I don't care," Voldemort shouted. "I don't fucking care about you. I'm running this bloody show. Did _you_ cast a stasis spell? Did you? Well, shut up then. If I say we're not going in, we're not going in."

"I _caun't _cast a stasis spell, as you kneuw perfectly well. Yeu might be a genius, but you've got bugger all common sense."

True. I wondered if I should back Albert up, but decided to stay out of it. Voldemort relieved his feelings by yelling, "Twat!"

"And _how _are yeu going to get rid of the bombs?" Albert demanded. "If you're not dismentling them?"

The bombs. The missiles leered from within the submarine; they looked strangely innocuous, little stripy factory chimneys. I wondered why I'd never joined CND or Ploughshare or something. It seemed rather late now.

"I'm Vanishing them," Voldemort said shortly.

"VENISHING them!"

"What?!"

"I kneuw yeu like to mix magic and technology, but this is RIDICULOUS! Look, dismentling this type of warhead is quite straightforwar – "

"I'M NOT GOING NEAR IT!" shouted Voldemort.

Oh, so now they were going to throttle each other. I squatted down and put my head in my hands. This only seemed to aggravate the temperamental twosome, since they shouted simultaneously, "STAND UP!"

"_Why _Venish it?" Albert appealed. "_Why?_"

"Because there is no other way of getting rid of the plutonium, as far as I can see," Voldemort yelled impatiently. "An ageing spell of some sort would theoretically work but, given the half-lives involved, it just wouldn't be feasible. The only Philosopher's Stone I know of was destroyed," glare at me, "and, frankly, its powers would have been very difficult to harness in the first place. I _could _just Vanish the explosives and the fuel and prevent the bomb being launched or detonating, but it's not enough. I don't want the Muggles to have any plutonium at – "

"You can't pinpoint the pleutonium from here, not witheout going on board!"

"So?" said Voldemort.

"OH, SO YOU'RE GOING TO VENISH THE ENTIRE BLOODY WARHEAD, ARE YOU?" screeched Albert. "Go ahead. Show me just how yeu're planning to do that."

Voldemort showed his fangs and grated, "I will."

Trying to Vanish a nuclear bomb in a fit of bad temper. Great. Gripped by a feeling of impending doom, I tried to intervene with "You ought to think about this – "

Too late. He brandished his wand like a scorpion lashing its tail and shouted, "_EVANESCO!_" Not just the warhead, but the entire missile promptly vanished.

Albert was speechless. I laughed hysterically for a very long time. Evanesco is a spell you use to clean up at the end of Potions. The sight of Voldie using it to dispose of sixty tonnes of fibreglass and plutonium was too surreal. Recycle Trident, indeed. I pictured Voldemort crumpling up the warhead and throwing it into his green bin.

"Very nice demonstration of power, comrade," Albert said at last, "although I think it maight have worked better had there been more people around."

Voldie made eloquent movements with his eyebrows.

"Well," Albert elucidated, turning round to include me in this, "since the plutonium itself weighs eunly ten kilograms..."

This elicited a broad, smug smile on Voldemort's part. The smile widened to a grin. Finally he cackled incredibly loudly, and Albert suddenly joined in. They did the whole hooting and dancing and slapping-each-other-on-the-back thing all over again, while I just stood and watched in bemusement, since for some reason I didn't find it funny any more. Really, the whole thing should have been called The Hottie And Riddle Show. I'd watch it.

Eventually they stopped laughing and Voldemort wandered down alongside the sub, Vanishing the plutonium and the fuel doofers in the remaining missiles. Albert explained to me spontaneously that the fuel had to go too because, even without a nuclear explosion, a sixty-tonne lump of metal wasn't a very nice thing to drop on your enemies. I nodded obediently. He was quite sensible really.

At last Voldie strode back to us two, still shivering and huddled in his scarf, and said "Right. Enough for you, Albert?"

"It was meust satisfactory."

"Because you didn't have to do any of the work, you mean. All right, Harry, we can go now."

"I'll be geuing back to China," Albert said, pacing nervously. "I weun't tell them where you're staying for a while, they seemed quite engry – "

"Stop _fussing_, Albert," Voldie yawned; and, of course, the sight set me off too. I took a great mouthful of seaweedy air and yawned out, "You didn't ask him if he'd seen the German people that write magical runes in textbooks."

"What?!" Albert said.

"Oh," said Voldie. "Yes, I have, I've asked him loads of times. Albert, have you found out anything more about the élite since the Seventies?"

"No," said Albert. "Really, you're not still on that, are y – "

"There you go," Voldie told me.

"It would make much mhaw sense to deu things _now_," Albert argued, obviously unimpressed with the élite, if indeed they existed at all.

"We _are_," barked Voldie. "What d'you think we're doing, making fucking daisy chains? I'm pinning any hopes on invisible Teutons, I'm just keeping an eye out, all right?"

"Fine," sniffed Albert.

"Calm down," I said.

"But I've told yeu before that it's a euseless solution," Albert continued. "Any lasting solution to nuclear war, or all wars, hez to be democratic. Élites only prevent our tackling the problem at all, and create mhaw problems themselves..."

"I KNOW, ALBERT," said Voldie.

"And blue glows," I said.

"Ha," said Voldie, becoming much more animated. "Yes. Listen, Hottie, was that you stalking us at Fylingdales the other day? We don't know who it was, except that they made some noise and then disappeared and left a blue glow behind."

"A blue gleo?" said Albert. "What, the blue flash?"

"No, _not _the blue flash. Something magical."

Pause. "Well... what?"

"I don't KNOW! So you don't, either."

"Neu. Sorry," Albert said, looking totally bewildered, and Voldemort growled to himself and started sharpening his claws with a nail-file.

"Er... so... if that's all..." said Albert.

"That is all," said Voldemort. "And I really need to get on with my research."

"Bleedin' liar," I said in Parseltongue.

"Shut up," he said out of the side of his mouth.

GET INDONESIA OUT OF EAST TIMOR, read the final bit of graffiti. I don't know anything about East Timor, but we did get out.


	9. Chapter 4b

**A Comedy In A Foreign Language: Chapter 4b**

We arrived back at house in Wales, where, of course, the same sunshine was streaming through the same window at the same angle; and Voldemort stared at it with great dislike and said, "I hate how it's always the same time here."

"It's not its fault," I said inanely. He glared at me and started unwinding his scarf, and I ventured, "We could just go somewhere else."

"No, we can't," he said grumpily. "We need a base so people like Albert and the house-elf can find us, not to mention all the people they'll be sending from the Chinese Ministry."

"Leave a note," I suggested while I was putting the water on to boil for a cup of tea (NB: kettles are one of the best inventions ever), and Voldemort told me we didn't know yet whether they could read English; which, as it turned out, they couldn't.

First an elderly brown-skinned woman turned up and yelled at us in a completely unfamiliar language; we couldn't understand a word she was screeching and she couldn't understand English, French, German, Romanian, Arabic or Russian, all of which Voldemort tried on her in succession, so that was a fairly unedifying conversation. Next, two Russians arrived; a tall, grey-bearded bloke and a fat ginger woman. Voldemort greeted them automatically with "Zdrastvuytie, tovaritch," which for some reason didn't go down very well. Then the three of them had a long argument and the Russians eventually left with grim faces.

"Well, they say they're fucked," Voldemort noted heavily, "which doesn't really tell us anything we didn't already know."

"It doesn't?" I said blankly.

"There are something like 20,000 warheads in Russia," he said, nearly killing me on the spot. "Five thousand of them don't work."

"But that's good, isn't it?" I said, clutching at straws.

"Well, it would be, if we knew what they do instead of working."

"And in America?" I said hopefully.

"Say thirteen thousand. And it's dark there."

"So what do we do?"

"Carry on doing what we're doing," he said glumly, "and hope they sort it out."

He continued to pore over thuggishly inaccessible textbooks while muttering feverishly, occasionally creating molecular ball-and-rod diagrams in mid-air with his wand. He reminded me of Oliver Wood the night before the Quidditch Cup. I washed our clothes in the stream and dried them with a Drying Charm.

A steady stream of Chinese witches and wizards arrived, but conversation was rendered impossible by the fact that their English was terrible and Voldemort had forgotten all the Chinese languages he ever knew.

"Well, I can remember '你好' and '是'," he amended after they'd left, "but that wouldn't exactly have got us very far."

"Can't you cast some kind of... translation spell?" I wanted to know.

"An interpreting spell, you mean," he said. "I asked that of an interpreter once."

"What did he say?"

"When she'd stopped laughing she said 'I can tell you're not a linguist'. And you're definitely not, if you think most interpreters are men."

"What are you? Well. A physicist."

"Not really... I've never specialised, except in the Dark Arts. I can speak a few languages, but that's not linguistics. Being a linguist involves the freakish ability to think in several different dimensions simultaneously _about the way people's minds work_. Absolutely intolerable."

"But you seem to know so much about the way people's minds work." Stare. "Well, the way _your _mind works."

"The first thing you discover is that your mind's nothing like anybody else's."

"Is the interpreter still alive?" I asked. "Can we find her and get her to translate?"

"To _interpret_, not translate. No, we can't. I killed her."

Pause.

"You haven't forgotten what I am, have you, Harry?" he said softly, showing his fangs in a faint smile. "I'm a psychopathic tyrant whose only moral virtue is an overriding terror of any type of bomb falling from the sky."

I had to swallow a few times, but said reasonably firmly, "That's quite useful for the time being."

Did he have to keep reminding me what a horrible bastard he was? It would be so much easier to forget.

000

Eventually I got tired. With no change in daylight, and no way of telling the time, I had established a routine of just going to bed whenever I felt sleepy. Voldemort, who didn't appear to observe the same hours as mammals, just nodded when I told him I was off to bed; so I turned in, secure in the belief that he would take care of things. I was so tired I could have slept through a thunderstorm, and, in fact, I did.

At some point the meanderings of my dreams stopped abruptly and I was left blinking in bed and wondering why I had awoken. That only lasted a second, because at that point all this muffled shouting started up and I realised the house was full of people. This was most unusual. I decided the odds were strong that either (a) the newcomers would try to kill Voldemort or (b) he would try to kill them; so I decided to put in an appearance.

Upon peeping through the arch I discovered that the entire kitchen and dining room had been given over to an impromptu pow-wow. Every space was packed full of Chinese, Russian, South African and various other witches and wizards, plus a bored-looking Indian elf, who was once again levitating six feet off the ground and taking notes. Voldie was sitting in the middle with a mulish expression. The mood was decidedly tense.

Voldie looked up, saw me and snapped, "Tea, please, Harry."

"_Chae, chahiye_," Lakshmi helpfully interpreted, and the room was suddenly full of voices repeating this important message while I put the water on to boil. I noted, bemused, that one of the Chinese witches was actually in chains, and that the captors sitting to her left and right were watching her with needly eyes. I wondered why they'd brought her to the meeting, then realised there wasn't really any other option.

An extremely ancient-looking Chinese wizard started to talk; well, I say extremely ancient, but even that's relative. Voldemort was a spring chicken compared with this lot. Most had white hair and beards down to the floor; the room was crammed with bunions, walking sticks and wrinkles. Even Albert Hottie looked pretty past it, come to that. The only young-looking person was Lakshmi, but I wasn't sure how long house-elves lived. I wondered how old Dobby was. He might be a hundred. You could never tell.

Anyway, a different, marginally younger Chinese wizard started to interpret for the first one, and while I was getting all the mugs ready I heard him say, "Besides, sir, as I was saying, if it _was _necessary to cast this spell, you left it remarkably late..."

"It was charmed to activate automatically if the American forces attained Defcon 1," Voldie snarled. "What was I supposed to do, cast it myself when the sirens sounded? When it took me a bloody _year _to cast?"

The Russian woman interrupted, in Russian, naturally, and Voldemort listened impatiently and then deprecated, "She is saying that Defcon 1 wasn't a good cut-off point, and that I should have set the spell to activate itself rather earlier. I'm going to tell her that's a stupid idea," and he did, very thoroughly by the sound of it; or perhaps Russian's just a fairly verbose language. In the background people interpreted his comments into five or six different languages, sometimes at a very high volume, since a lot of the ancient persons were going a bit deaf. The noise was overwhelming. I poured out the tea and started handing it round; an elderly East Asian person took an absent mouthful, choked in horror and spat it out all over the table. I began to perceive why international peace talks almost always ended in tears.

"Wrong type of tea," Albert whispered to me. "Try Darjeeling. And don't put milk in it."

"Fine, fine," I muttered, starting all over again. Meanwhile Voldemort was snapping, "Yes, correct, and I knew that was a possibility, and I could see that if the procedure was dangerous, disrupting it might have induced the Thaothong effect and killed a couple of hundred people – well, _what? _Who cares?" he demanded as everyone went berserk. "Oh, all right, then, listen, listen, for god's sake, d'you think a nuclear war _wouldn't _have disrupted it? Lord only knows what the combined forces of chain reaction and interrupted experiment would have unleashed," and after some discussion the Chinese bloke basically agreed and that particular argument was over.

My relief at this proved premature. The disrupting-magical-experiments argument had been two-sided, because Voldemort understood what a magical experiment was; we were now moving into nuclear war territory, and most of the wizards and witches here appeared to have been born considerably prior to the discovery of radiation. Even as I handed Voldemort his mug he started hooting, "Yes, it _does _mean they've started a war. They don't just initiate Defcon 1 for fun during their coffee break," and a long argument began.

Even though almost nothing they were saying made sense, even when it was interpreted into English, I could see that teams were forming among the foreigners. Some of them appeared to understand what Voldemort was talking about, particularly Albert and the two Russians we'd met before; Albert kept trying to interrupt and explain things, but nobody seemed to listen to him. The Russians, on the other hand, had great influence, and soon our parties had formed: on the right, the incredibly ancient Chinese, who had some difficulty remembering where America was; on the left, the Russians, Albert and the ancient woman we'd seen before, who turned out to be Peruvian. She could only communicate by idiot boards and knew nothing whatsoever about nuclear war but was mad as hell that it was the middle of the night in the Americas and dragons were rampaging through Peru.

I sat down next to Voldemort and listened. I needn't have bothered, because none of it made much sense. The Russians demanded to know why the planes had scrambled at such-and-such a time, and Voldie argued with them while the oldies asked what a plane was; Albert said he'd been to Israel and done a load of unintelligible stuff there, and Voldie quizzed him about it while everyone else in the room stared at him blankly like sheep in car headlights; the Chinese asked why Voldie hadn't told anybody since 1957 that he'd cast this spell, and Voldie pointed out that he had been distinctly _persona non grata_ among the witzy community for most of this time.

Then there was a discussion lasting at least half an hour about whether Yeltsin had consulted his football, which confused me profoundly; I kept imagining Boris dressed up like Trelawney in huge specs and diaphanous shawls, exhorting us all to use our Inner Eye as we gazed into the crystal football. However, they finally concluded that yes, the football had been consulted, and as far as I could make out, this was bad news; at any rate, they all started shouting again.

Eventually, just as the long round of interpretation-reply-interpretation began again, Voldemort tapped me on the head with a spiky claw and whispered, "You can go now. There's no reason why you should have to sit through this."

I got up very rapidly indeed. "You won't curse any of them, will you?"

"Not unless I have to," he said indifferently, which left me hoping none of our guests said anything rude. I really had to get away from it all, though, so I went and took a nap.

I was woken abruptly an hour or so later when from the next room I heard ground-shaking screeching. Rubbing my eyes, I picked out the words "_WHEN _THE WAR ENDS!", and concluded that some hapless Asian person was about to be forced to wash his or her mouth out. Now might be a good time to get up.

By the time I arrived in the kitchen the mouth-washing was mostly finished, and there was only a stunned, wet Chinese bloke and a seething Voldemort to prove it had ever happened. Certain factions, however, appeared less than pleased, and the Chinese bloke was the least among them. The Russians were shooting one another meaningful looks that suggested they had correctly identified Voldemort's cuckoo tendencies; the Peruvian witch was goggling, and Albert just looked resigned. The peace talks, I decided, might be about to hit a large pothole.

They did: the Russian bloke with the grey beard cleared his throat and rapped the table, and everyone looked at him blankly, possibly grateful for any escape from the impromptu ducking-stool scenario. "Yes?" Voldemort said irritably. "What?"

I can't give you my reactions to the next scene as it unfolded, because it took place entirely in Russian, which I didn't understand. Therefore I will translate it retrospectively for your benefit. I didn't do a great deal anyway, until right at the end.

"Are you sure, Your Lordship," he said with a slight trace of mockery, "that you are entirely sane?"

Voldie curled his lip like an unimpressed horse and said "I'm not at all sure you are, if you're trying to start something with me."

"I know you were in the Indian Ministry of Magic yesterday," the Russian said menacingly. "We went to the library there, and guess what we found?"

"Twenty-six tigers dancing the tango," Voldie said irritably. It would have been good if that had been true, but instead the bloke produced the book about Nostrodamus and held it up mockingly. The non-Russians took a moment to figure out what it was, but then, to my surprise, there was a great chorus of groaning and eye-rolling. Clearly, they didn't find him as impressive as Voldemort did.

"AND?" he demanded, showing his teeth. "You find it surprising that a war breaks out at the end of the century and I think to consult Nostrodamus's writings?"

"I don't find it _surprising_," the bloke said. "I find it _stupid_."

Voldie shot upwards like a rubber band and suddenly sprouted a wand. The Russian gadgy did the same. "Stop it! Stop it!" I begged, grabbing at Voldemort's sleeve. "Stop fucking cursing people, we haven't got time!"

There was a silence of several seconds, during which he didn't move or break eye contact with the Russian bloke at all; but at last he said "I shall allow this fool to count himself among the fortunate," in a very low voice, and sat back down.

"Well?" the fat ginger woman said. "You admit that it's true? You think this war is the one that Nostrodamus predicted, and you were seeking guidance from his prophecies?"

Voldemort rolled his eyes with expert disdain and said "No, I do _not _think this war is the one he was referring to, since he was not a true Seer and, besides, the year is 1997 and not 99."

The Russian bloke's question was still being relayed around the room, and its interpretation into Chinese elicited an enormous amount of angry groaning. "Voldemort, stop aggravating people," I heard Albert trying to intervene, but everyone ignored him again.

"Oh," Mr Russian said. "So simple. So Nostrodamus just got his sums wrong. So you're not obsessed with prophecies this time? Well, that does make a change."

Between gritted teeth, inasmuch as you can grit very long fangy teeth while speaking Russian, Voldie said, "What do you mean by that?"

"Let me explain this simply," the ginger woman said. "Sixteen years ago you believed a prophecy to be true and acted on it. All you managed to do with that was fuck everything up. And now again you believe a prophecy to be true and you are the only person who knows how to interpret it and the only one who knows what should be done. And you go ahead casting your spells and fiddling with your bombs, and you expect us to listen to you and join you, assuming that you will _not _have got this prophecy disastrously wrong as you did before, forgetting that you are a mass murderer who has shown himself time after time to be untrustworthy – "

Bang. Out came the Voldewand. Up jumped the Russians. "Listen," I said hastily, jumping in front of Voldie, "calm down, don't lose your rag – " But I don't know what happened after that, because she really did Stun me, the cheeky sod, and I didn't wake up until several hours later; so I suppose that'll have to be the end of this section.


	10. Chapter 4c

**A Comedy In A Foreign Language – Chapter 4c**

In my stupefied slumber, I was trapped by my first proper nightmare. It seemed I had finally been pervaded by Voldemort's terror.

I remembered that night when I was about four or five, when Uncle Vernon had discovered at the last moment that all his minutes for tomorrow's meeting had been stapled together in the wrong order. I was duly dragged out of my cupboard and conscripted to separate the papers and re-staple them, spreading them all out in the space behind the living room sofa. Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia were watching a film about nuclear war.

I don't remember whether I understood the facts; the nature of the devastation and so forth. I don't think it really matters. The atmosphere still got me; the images of darkness, horror, burning. I didn't even see the first half, just heard the soundtrack; and that was enough. Perhaps it made it worse.

Darkness. Flames. Frightened voices –

"Hello, Harry," a fuzzy Voldemort said from a chair by my bedside, his voice suggesting great amusement. "I hope you're feeling the better for your nap," and the room was full of sunshine and there was no-one else there.

"I feel horrible," I complained, trying to sit up and finding it made my head ache even worse. Voldie tapped me on the bonce with his wand and the pain abruptly departed, although my mouth still tasted nasty and my eyes were sore. "Thanks," I said, lying back down. "Er, what happened?"

"Well, you got Stunned, obviously," he said, handing me my glasses and a glass of water, "and then we had a minor dust-up, but nobody else really suffered any damage. You get points for jumping in front of me, by the way. That showed real loyalty."

I spluttered on my water. "Loyalty!"

"Well?"

"It was the only thing to do. I thought she was going to Stun you, and that might have disrupted the stasis spell. Or you would have killed her, more likely, and then everyone else would have killed _you_."

"Ah, so you decided to de-escalate the conflict," said Voldemort. "That was a very good idea, actually. I kept coming very close to losing my temper, and so did everyone else. Possibly the Muggle top bananas should take a Harry with them to summits and he could talk them down."

"And get Stunned," I muttered.

"Well, it was very helpful, as you say," he said calmly, and then spoilt the effect by shouting, "which is one of the FEW bloody helpful things anyone has DONE today!"

"What did they say?" I said wearily. Apart from anything else, I was not at all sure I liked having Voldie talk to me while I was lying in bed, especially since a simple process of deduction revealed that he was the one who'd put me there; well, unless he'd bullied Albert into doing it for him, anyway. I decided I'd have to put up with it. At least I had my clothes on.

"Well," he began, brightening.

"Briefly," I begged. "In language I can understand."

"Oh. All right. Important things first: the Russians now accept that the war is underway and I can't just cancel the stasis spell and hope everything'll be all right. Some of the younger Chinese spring chickens have remembered that the Muggles have some kind of dangerous weapon and they're busy persuading the two-hundred-year-old ones to do something about it, which is good. We can't find any Americans, which isn't too surprising, but we've sent some people to look for them."

"Why isn't it surprising?"

"A lot of their oldest and most powerful witzies were killed off by the Dark Lord Thingy Thingy in the 1950s."

"Who chose his name?"

"I can't remember his name. It was Anishinabe for Vile Rage or something."

"So where is he now?"

"He got killed off by a different Dark Lord in the 70s. Amateur," Voldemort sniffed.

"And you had a fight with the Russians."

"Yes, I enclosed you in a protective shield," he said proudly, clearly expecting flowers and applause, "and we had a very OK Corral-style duel with people hiding behind chairs or cheering us on and so on. Then eventually we got tired and stopped and I put you to bed. Then we carried on the discussion for a bit and agreed to meet tomorrow and they all left."

"And the Peruvian woman?"

"She's staying in China for now. She was fed up of doing everything in the dark."

"Right," I said as all this sank slowly through my rather resistant brain. "So, like, did anyone do the washing up?"

"Dream _on_," said Voldemort, adding generously, "although I did fix the broken windows."

We decamped to the kitchen, where I straightened up all the chairs that had been knocked over when Voldie had had his scrimmage with the Russians. I also had to wipe scorch marks off the cooker hood. Then I washed thousands of teacups while sat in his favourite armchair and ranted about the attitudes, scientific knowledge and personal habits of all the other wizards and witches. Apparently they were obstructive, mistrustful, snobbish, opposed to the Dark Arts, drank too much, had illegible handwriting, probably still believed in the Four Humours, didn't know what a bomb was and had bad breath.

"Why do they keep blaming _me _for everything?" he demanded irritably, tossing back a glass of pink gin he'd cunningly mixed himself. "Just because I have some faint understanding of Muggle politics, which is clearly too much for their puny minds to grasp? If I hear any of them say 'half-blood', they'll die."

"Oh, shut up," I said in disgust, carrying the first lot of plates over to the bucket. "Like that matters now. You can't go round killing the people on our side, and besides, they can't slag you off when you're the only one who _did _anything... Er?" I finished, turning round to see that he was glaring at me over the point of his wand.

"Huh," he grunted, putting it down on a little round table. "I was going to hex you until you mentioned the part about my being useful."

"Well, you are. And that's got nothing to do with your blood status," I said, going back for more plates.

"It has _everything _to do with my blood status, dolt. It's _because _I was raised by the putrid Muggles that I know so much about Muggle warfare. Whereas that lot... They kept asking how the war began, which of course was a stupid question because a full answer would use up time we don't have, and they didn't understand the short answer..."

"What is the short answer?"

"Incompetence, brashness and technological errors. Be quiet. Of course, they don't understand what a computer is, and when we mentioned the situation in the Middle East they said 'What situation is that?' So it was an uphill struggle."

"Oh great," I said, depressed. "So the only people we're stuck here with don't know anything about bombs _or _politics, except you, and you're mad."

"_Ha_rry!" he said, greatly amused. "I never knew you were such a bitch!"

"Well, you are! You said so! And they don't trust you..."

"That's only because I'm a mass murderer," he said casually, then added gloomily, "or at least, I hope so. You might have noticed that the Russians don't think much of Albert..."

"Yeah, I noticed that," I said animatedly. "What was that about?"

"They think he couldn't possibly know about nuclear science (or _anything,_ possibly) because he's African."

"What?!" I hooted in righteous outrage.

"Well," he said fairly, "nuclear programmes in Africa _are_ rather thin on the ground, but the fact remained that there was one and he infiltrated it. He's the only person here, apart from me, who's actually dismantled a bomb, and _that_ pack of sneering apparatchiks have no right to laugh at him. Oh, and he did it all by himself, as well. Nobody to help him in the 80s."

There was a silence while we contemplated the plight of Albert. Voldemort gave a long, gloomy sigh, sank into a small dark pit of depression, and said, "I don't know how he did it."

"Come on, Voldie," I wheedled. "You can do it. You'll be a hero. You'll stop the war."

He looked almost as if he was going to laugh for a moment, and his scowl of gloom appeared slightly leavened. "As if they'd call me a hero for doing what anyone with any sense would do. And wash your – "

"Yes, yes," I said crossly, and marched out to the stream to get a bucket of water. After casting a quick Purifying Charm I put the bucket in the kitchen sink and stuck my head in it.

"Thank you for that, Marvin," said Voldemort in a pitying tone when I finally came back up. He looked a lot happier now; possibly he'd had another gin while I was out. "Now listen, here's the problem. I've given the Russians and Chinese and other hoojahs a rough explanation of what a missile is, together with a warning that it's all extremely dangerous, and they've basically expressed willingness to learn how to defuse one. They should be able to Vanish the plutonium successfully once they've figured out what it is, and the locations of the silos are pretty open knowledge. We've even found a way round the planes..." he gave me an ironic bow. "Out of the mouths of babes, indeed, although I think they're probably going to cast a Summoning Charm in concert, since, relatively speaking, planes don't weigh very much."

He started drumming his claws on the little table, which produced a noise like a millipede trundling along in hobnail boots.

"When it comes to submarines, however, we are truly fucked. Unfortunately, as you noticed, I Vanished all the warheads on that sub that's still in Faslane; which turns out to have been a mistake, because all those new people want me to demonstrate the process and now I can't. I suppose I could stick a lump of tin or something where the plutonium should be and Vanish that instead, but I think the suspicious bastards might be expecting that... But, er, frankly, Harry, I was too embarrassed to admit that I'm afraid of going underwater, so I told them I was too busy to do it."

He looked, and sounded, almost sheepish. I meditated for an impossibly short space of time on what a strange thing the human mind was. Voldie had never shown the slightest sign of unease over his status as a baby-killing, Dementor-bossing mass murderer, but he was horrified at the prospect of being exposed as slightly neurotic. Peer pressure can achieve some very odd things.

"So... er... I don't suppose you've got any brilliant Chosen One ideas as to how I can get it done?"

_Me? _I gaped at him in dismay and said, "Why can't Albert show them how to do it?"

"I asked him to and he won't," said Voldie. "Obviously, he doesn't like them very much."

"Aren't you going to Crucio him and tell him to do it anyway?" I demanded, which elicited an astonished stare, a loud giggle and the question, "D'you think he'd appreciate being Crucioed?"

"You did it to me!"

"Yes," he said dispassionately, his eyes now focussed on an invisible victim somewhere in the middle distance, "but I think it's best if I avoid Unforgivables for the time being. I could happily curse some of those Russians to death, but you've demonstrated very nicely that we should probably all try to be friends."

"Fat bloody chance. And why can't they just do all the disarming themselves?"

Voldie's eyeballs spiralled in exasperation. "Because it is DAN-ge-rous. Because unless they use exactly the right spell, they could cause a criticality. You don't understand this, Potter. Look, going near plutonium irradiates you, I assume you know that, but crushing it down into a very small space is what causes the chain reaction; so if, for example, they'd used a Shrinking Spell, that would have been catastrophic. A Shrinking Spell gets rid of rocks and so forth very nicely, but if used on plutonium it would have detonated the bomb. I mean, the effect would depend on the strength of the spell," he continued, much more animated now that he was discussing physics, "and a powerful witz with a good grasp of Transfiguration would cause much more damage than a useless one, because magic is better at compressing things than Muggle explosives; so a strong spell, cast quickly, would increase the yield of the bomb enormously. It would create a super-weapon. Oh, and it would also have detonated the rest of the bombs on the sub, making everything even worse... and so on. So we would have had a huge hole in the ocean and several dead witches and wizards."

I was silent. Then I said, "Ah."

"Yes. Quite. And if they'd tried to bash through the warhead using the Reductor Curse or something similar, they'd have set off the explosives, with a similarly bad effect. Look, Harry, it's like giving a gun to a kid; they don't understand which part's dangerous. I expect the risk is actually a lot less than I'm making it sound," he conceded, "but the consequences would be so awful if something _did _go wrong that we can't afford the risk at all, so I've absolutely got to show them how to do it right."

This seemed incontrovertible. I sat down opposite him and said slowly, "So _you_ can't go down there in the dark and show them..."

"No, I CAN'T. I've ALREADY TOLD YOU that," he snapped, which I found very unfair, since I hadn't been trying to change his mind; but I kept my temper and continued, "And Albert won't. And there aren't any submarines in dock anywhere else."

"Well," he said, and paused in thought. "Maybe America... I'M NOT GOING TO AMERICA."

"What's wrong with it?" I said wearily.

"IT'S DARK THERE."

"Fine. So if you can't go down to the subs, we need to bring them back up."

"Bring them back up! And how, precisely? Since none of us can pilot a submarine and all their engines are frozen?"

"Tie them to the Durmstrang ship and give them a tow."

There was a long silence, then he said, "I begin to see why you always manage to defeat me. I don't think the Durmstrang model is strong enough to pull one of those, though."

"There must be another one somewhere," I argued, unimpressed. "It can't be the only one in the world..."

"True. And piloting it?"

I gave this some thought. "I don't know anything about it specifically, but I don't think it can be too hard, because Karkaroff made the seventh-year Durmstrang students drive it all the way to Hogwarts."

"Seventh-year Durmstrang students," he muttered. "Do you know, Potter, I think you've got it... Damn! You're not even a scientist! It must be practicality that always pulls you through. I'll ask Albert if there are any more ships, and I'll tell all the other witzies about it tomorrow."

"Cool," I said, pleased.

"Yes," he said, still amazed. "Yes! D'you want some gin, Potter? Harry."

"You bet I want some gin," I said, and we sat there companionably drinking in our armchairs until I said, "I had a nightmare while I was out."

"Don't you usually have nightmares?" he said curiously.

"Only about you. – Stop giggling. I remembered," I said slowly, "when I was about four or five, and there was this nuclear war film on the telly..."

"A film?" he said, instantly attentive. "What, _War Games_?"

"Er..."

"Americans who accidentally trigger a war by mucking about with computers?"

"Oh, no. No. It was the one in Yorkshire, with the melting milk bottles."

"_Threads_," he said immediately. "That was a made-for-TV film. Sheffield, 1984."

"Right – what – You shouldn't know that. You were a spirit at the time."

"I saw it two years ago, I got it on video."

"But... _why?_"

"I watched everything I'd missed during the '80s."

"WHY?! You're fucking _terrified _of nuclear war!" I bawled.

He scrunched up his face until he looked like Dudley eating a grapefruit and said sourly, "I know... or, I should know by now. I just can't help myself. I suppose I just want to... know the worst..."

"The worst's _happening!_"

"And I know what to do!" he said, suddenly triumphant. "There, Harry, aren't you glad you're not stuck here with an optimist?"

"You're so bloody silly," I said, unable to stop myself laughing. "You're so brainy, but you can't stop yourself, can't stop yourself watching TV programmes that even scare _me_, and I'm not scared of nuclear war. It's just..."

But I couldn't say what it just was, and I sat there turning my glass round and round until he said decisively, "It's personal."

"Personal!"

"Because that's my thing. Radiophobia, nuclear war... it's about me. It's personal."

"It was about _every_one _dying!"_

"Not really everyone. They were using a wildly optimistic Square Leg-type scenario, in which..."

"How can it be personal if it's about billions of people dying?!"

"But _I _would die!" he shouted, suddenly incandescent. "_I _would die! _Me! _This isn't some bloody TV programme or some Muggle-hunt where you can say 'Oh yes, how profound' and carry on. This would be _the end of my bloody life! _It would be – " and then he was silenced by the horror of it all and couldn't say any more.

"Other people have lives too, you know," I said testily.

"They _might _have," he said. "How do you know? What about the evil demon?"

"I have a life, all right?"

"Yes, but it's not _my _life! It's not _mine!"_

"And why are _you _so fucking important?!"

"Because I exist! _I_ exist! Me! Me!" he shouted, astounded at the concept of his sentience. I wondered how anyone could reach his age and still be amazed by the fact that he existed. I've never been able to decide if he's very clever or very thick.

At the time, I decided it was the latter. "Other people had lives," I said flatly. "My mum and dad had lives. They existed."

There was a long silence; as it turned out, a perturbed silence. "Is that what it means?" he said at last. "Love? To care about someone else's death as if it were your own? Look – no," he balked, "it's not _possible _to feel that. You _carry on living_. Other people's deaths are just not important; you don't _feel _them the same way – "

"It was important enough to my mum that she died _for _me," I said, feeling the words coming out of me through that same old pain, "so you must be wrong, mustn't you? If she did it, then you're just not thinking right."

Voldemort mumbled unintelligibly to himself. At last he snorted and scoffed, "It's all right for you, isn't it? And her. You're not mad. You don't know how alone it makes you feel."

"She's DEAD. And you told me I _was _mad," I pointed out.

"And when you were more mad, when you were depressed and shouting: did you feel alone?"

Yes. I didn't want to admit he was right. "Have we gone quite deep enough here?" I said drowsily. "It's like we're telling each other our life stories or something." I finished my gin and poured myself another.

"Yep," he said. "Who was it who said you never really know a man, sic, until you've watched him die?"

"Uuuuuurgh!"

"Because I suppose he would think that watching him during imminent nuclear war – now, that's _really _getting to know him."

"Do you believe it?" I said, faintly disgusted.

"No," he said. "You never really know anyone else at all."


	11. Queer Fish

**How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Lord Voldemort**

**Chapter 5: Queer Fish**

In the "morning" I arose, went to shave and discovered my wand was missing. I searched the kitchen for it and found nothing; after much cursing I aroused Voldemort (no, not like that, you mucky buggers), who fumed "Typical," and went to exchange his striped pyjamas and dressing gown for the usual robes.

"What's happened to it?" I shouted round the door.

"That Chinese thief – Li Hsu-Deng, or whatever her name is – she's stolen it," he shouted back. "Her role in life is to pinch everything that's not nailed down."

"I didn't take it near her, did I?" I said, and then remembered I'd put it down near the Chinese contingent when I made the second batch of tea.

"That's why she was in chains," Voldie informed me, emerging from his bedroom properly clothed. "If they'd left her behind, she'd have nicked everything in China before they got back, the fucking waster. Theft is her sole talent and has hypertrophied to make up for the lack of everything else."

It occurred to me that Voldie's killing-people abilities had hypertrophied to make up for his lack of tact and charm, but I decided to keep that one to myself. "Can we get it back?" I said. "After all, she can't exactly have sold it."

He gave me a funny look. "We damn well _will _get it back," he said, "whatever she thinks she's done with it; and if it's damaged, she'll pay – "

"No, no," I said crossly. "No killing!"

"Fine," he said. "You've got a choice. Come with me to China, and then you'll be able to make sure I don't kill anyone; or stay here away from the horrid Apparition, and I'm damned if I'll pander to your airy-fairy scruples. And if it's the first one, you'd better get a move on."

"I'm ready!" I said indignantly.

"You are?"

"Yes!"

"Good," he said, scooping me up by the waist, and we sailed a third of the way round the planet and landed in the most startling Ministry I had yet encountered. We were standing on a pinnacle of milky rock a good two hundred feet above a bare, lunar slope of scree; to our right a door led into the rock, accompanied by a little window, and to our left a creaky-looking rope bridge stretched away to a second pinnacle, and thence to a cliff riddled with at least a hundred doors and windows.

"Christ," I said, gawping, grabbing hold of the rope bridge before Voldemort could drop me. "This is weird."

"You've never been here before?" he said, putting me down as indifferently as if we were in a car park in Sussex. "Quite famous, is the Chinese Ministry."

"I'd never seen any but the British one till this happened," I said, peering down in amazement at the bare rock, the distant hills and forest. "And that was only to get tried by the Wizengamot and nearly killed by you."

"Best way to see it," he assured me. "Are you coming? I think they're mostly holed up in the cliff part," and with that he trundled lightly across the rope bridge as if he were Nadia Comaneci.

Looking back and seeing my face, he added, "This thing is surrounded by an invisible barrier, Potts. You can't fall off."

"Oh," I mumbled, and tiptoed carefully along its creaky length. He was quite right; it was as sturdy as a packhorse bridge. I peered up in fascination at the tips of the pinnacles, way above us, some obscured by fat clots of fog. The air was cool and humid. I decided I liked this a lot better than the Indian place, or the British one, for that matter.

We trundled from pinnacle to pinnacle, and finally into the cliff, and I was disappointed to discover that the insides of the cave-dwellings were pretty much like any old building; they had posh wallpaper and so on. They didn't have any frozen Chinese witches or wizards, which I thought was odd until we walked past a large room and I saw that someone had helpfully stacked all the immobile people in there to keep them out of the way. I found that rather callous; also, for some reason, hilarious. My laughter only irritated Voldemort; "What?" he demanded. "It's the only sensible thing to do with them. If all those narrow little bridges were blocked with frozen people, there really _would _be some blood shed. And hurry up."

"Nice of you to be so cheeky when I can't hex you for it," I observed, sprinting down a corridor to keep up with him.

"You ungrateful idiot. It's YOUR WAND I'VE COME HERE TO RETRIEVE," he shouted, and lashed the air with his own. There was an awful whistling crack, and horrible, gnarled thorns shot out of the floor and walls like a Herbology experiment gone mad.

I decided there was no point talking to him while he was in this mood.

The Chinese contingent was finally located having its breakfast (dinner? How much further ahead of Britain is China? And there was no time difference anyway while the stasis spell was in effect so... oh, sod it) in a giant dining hall. Demands for my wand were interpreted by its slightly less superannuated members; long conversations took place while Voldemort grew madder and madder, and I finally got worried, barged into the middle of them all and said loudly and clearly, "Where is my wand? I need my wand," while miming casting spells.

They all looked at me in surprise. There was a little more earnest conversation, then, just as it seemed Voldemort was about to do his nut, the youngest Chinese lass told me very solemnly, "We think Li Hsu-Deng stole it."

This somewhat less than earth-shaking revelation was, it appeared, as much as Voldie could take. With a yell of fury, he smashed all the crockery, cut the dining table in half and set fire to the curtains. In the ensuing mayhem I marched up to him, grabbed the front of his robes and hissed, "You know what? Fucking stop it. You just go home and leave this to me. You're only making everything worse."

He looked at me with surprised disdain. He didn't even bother to hex me; instead, he slapped me across the face. There was a spectacular _whack _and I reeled back and stood there blinking. The Chinese goggled, then howled with nervous laughter. This did not make me feel less humiliated. Actually, the humiliation was exacerbated. I fantasised about killing Voldemort horribly after pulling out his claws with a pair of pliers. Then I gritted my teeth, accepted that _one _of us had to be sensible and grown-up, and said as calmly as possible, "You go home. This is only aggravating you. I can deal with this fine. If you stay here someone'll try to Stun you again and it'll screw up your spell."

He stared at me, then sneered "I look forward to seeing you Apparate home," and vanished, leaving me in a mangled dining room with about fifteen enthralled Chinese people who stared at me as if I were a soap opera. Wonderful.

I stared back at them in dismay and said hopefully, "So, is Li Hsu-Deng round here?"

As it turned out, she was not. She was immured in a pinnacle a very long way from the cliffs, and we had to traverse about fifty rope bridges and ladders to get there. This was good, because (a) I got another eyeful of breathtaking Sinitic topography, and (b) it gave me time to calm down.

When we finally did get into the prison-pinnacle it was very surreal, because unlike the other chambers, this one was indeed a cave. No flat floors or wallpaper or anything here; it was a smooth round hole in a rock, with one window, a tap and a toilet. Yet there was Li Hsu-Deng, in her chains, sitting quite untroubled in the middle of the room and smiling as if she hadn't a care in the world.

"Er, hello," I said uncertainly.

"Hello," she greeted me, quite comprehensibly, although with very weird intonation.

"You can speak English!" I said. "Why didn't you interpret, last night?"

"Interpret," she said. "Ah, thee elders would not let me? They thought that I would lie to them." She finished this off with an unnerving beaming smile that made it clear that the elders had been right.

It didn't impress my guide at all, because he said something sharply in Chinese; Li, however, simply fluttered her eyelashes at him (I should point out that the effect was playful rather than conventionally sexy, since she was at least fifty, pretty fat and dressed like Professor Grubbly-Plank) and said "It is very nice to get visitor here? Life of a prisoner is really boring. There is not even anything to steal."

"It's that that got you here in the first place," I said, thinking that she was a fairly unlikely equivalent to Mundungus Fletcher. "And I really wouldn't mind having my wand back," I added hopefully.

She winked flirtatiously and said, "How about kiss from a pretty boy?"

My first impulse was to refuse this request, noisily and at length. Then I thought it over and decided it would probably expedite the process. I leaned forwards and gave her a swift peck on the cheek, and she beamed again and withdrew my wand from her cleavage.

My guide had a lot to say about this; indeed, it seemed he was shouting all the things that I'd kept quiet. I wasn't too bothered, because I was more concerned with wiping my wand clean of Li Hsu-Deng's boobie sweat without hurting her feelings; I scrubbed it unobtrusively behind my back and unleashed the fatal rain of red and green sparks, which made her grin again, widely. I was still blushing when I finally managed to ask the guard, "Could someone maybe Apparate me to Wales?"

"Huh?" he said blankly. It appeared Wales was unknown in China. Li and I embarked on lengthy explanations, finally resorting to drawing a map of the UK on the floor, me keeping a very tight grip on my wand as I did so and hoping she wouldn't help herself to anything more important than my spare change. At last the guide showed signs of understanding what we meant, hurled a final expletive at Li, who gave me a saucy wink, and Apparated me to the Isle of Man.

000

When I finally appeared in the kitchen of the house in Wales, after a long and confusing journey about which I _refuse _to go into further detail, Voldemort was sitting calmly in his armchair, reading a book and drinking iced tea. At the sight of me he burst out laughing and cheered, "Oh, just _look _at your face. You've still got an enormous red handprint."

"I'm glad you find it funny," I grated, managing, by a mighty effort of will, not to throw all the dirty glasses at him.

"I do," he said, not remotely abashed. "I like annoying teenagers. They're so easy to provoke."

I turned my back on him most emphatically, added an enormous amount of washing-up liquid to the bowl, and started washing my wand. "You moron," I muttered. "When you're not neurotic you're a smart-arsed antisocial prick. The fucking world's being destroyed and all you can think of is hitting people and killing people and..."

"I only slapped you round the face."

"You were going to kill Li Thingy if she didn't give my wand back!"

"So fucking what?"

I rubbed my wand with the tea towel so violently that a shower of small emeralds shot out of the end and rattled across the floor. "YOU'RE AN IRRESPONSIBLE FUCKING PSYCHOPATH. THAT'S FUCKING WHAT."

I gave the breakfast bar a hard kick for good measure. It, and Voldemort, remained unmoved.

"You like life, do you, Harry?" he said with a ghastly grin. "Think all living things are worthy of preservation? Do you? Well?"

"Yes," I said, low and angry.

"Fine," he said. "_Effervesco!_" and an enormous number of diaphanous bubbles exploded from his wand and cascaded crazily around the room. Even as I sat there amazed, watching them burst against the walls, he flung out an arm and said, "Go on. Catch them. Stop them popping."

I glared at him and cupped my hands to shield a passing bubble. I successfully preserved it for a couple of seconds, then it soundlessly expired. I grabbed the full washing-up bowl and used it to catch a few bubbles; a couple of them succeeded in adhering to the water, but most popped.

"Now imagine," he taunted, "that you have to keep _every single one _of those bubbles in existence for a good seventy years, that you have to dress them in bubble nappies and paint them with bubble drugs and push them round in little bubble wheelchairs. And every time one of them pops there is much anguish and wailing and rending of robes. What a mug's game, Potter. Is that what you want for a life? Is it? Is it?"

Tosser. The problem was, he would keep coming up with these brilliant metaphors at a moment's notice, and he damn well knew I couldn't. I glared at him, threw up my hands and turned away, saying in frustration, "Yeah, fine, you're cleverer than me and you can make clever arguments that I can't answer. But I – "

I was going to say that I was still rather partial to organisms and to life in general, but he grabbed me by the shoulders, twisted me round to face him and said, "I don't make clever arguments just to humiliate you. I'M NOT LIKE THAT. I DON'T DO THAT."

"Yes, you are!"

"_I'M NOT_."

"Right," I said, wide-eyed.

"I'm not that kind of person," he ranted. "If I needed to prove my great intellect and wit, I'd hardly do it against a child."

"I'm not a – !"

"Yes you are. Shut up."

"Bloody big and ugly child," I said.

"Yes, Harry, and I'm Michelangelo's David. Look, I am of an intellectual bent, you're not, and I don't seek to rub it in your face to prove I am your superior. And there it ends."

I finally deduced, "And you think Professor Dumbledore did that."

"He DID!"

"Mm," I said doubtfully, then, since a Voldemort-eruption seemed inevitable, "He never did it to _me_."

"Harry, dear, your sweet, woolly head wouldn't have taken the strain. Gryffindors are chosen for bravery, not ruthless ingenuity. Or a cynical and suspicious attitude towards strange old men."

He prowled elegantly across to the dining area and sat down with _Burns Nicht: A History Of Nuclear Protest In Scotland_. As far as he was concerned, quite evidently, the matter was closed.

As far as I was concerned, it wasn't. "_Why _did you hate him?" I demanded.

Voldemort levitated about six inches out of his chair. "Hate him?!" he spluttered. "_He_ hated _me!_"

"He – " I began, then remembered that Dumbledore had been suspicious of Voldemort before he'd ever set eyes on him, and was obliged to fall silent. "Mrs Cole badmouthed you to him," I said limply.

"She would, the old bag, but you can't put it down to that. The more he found out about me, the more he despised me – "

"Yeah, well, that's funny, isn't it, seeing as you kept _killing people_," I interposed, and he looked up at me reproachfully as though I'd mentioned my haemorrhoids at the dinner table.

"In any case," he said rather loudly, "he hated me."

"But – "

"He hated me for being hungry."

"He – " I began again, and stopped again as I realised what he'd just said. "For being _hungry! _What were you, Mr Blobby?"

"Not physically, you moron! I wanted intellectual sustenance. And various other things, such as power and eternal life, I admit; but you'd expect a headmaster to encourage some kid's desire to be a genius, and he didn't. He thought any insatiable craving was wrong; and I am quite _full _of insatiable cravings, since I wanted To Be Somebody. And I also love knowledge for its own sake."

"And power."

"Hmm," he said unenthusiastically. "I'm not so sure about that. The minions will insist on perpetually doing things _wrong_."

"Well, that's better than _being _a minion, isn't it?!"

"Oh, fine, all right, I like power! But listen, Potter, there is an entire fucking house, if you haven't noticed, one quarter of Hogwarts, which is a house for ambitious people! And he thought I was a monster because I was ambitious! I found it, actually, perfectly summed up in The Screwtape Letters: 'We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over.' (Quiet, you filthy-minded vermin.) That's the devil speaking. It's odd, because witzies and Muggle Christians have practically nothing in common philosophically, and yet they both seem to believe that obsessive hunger _per se _is bad. Dumbledore prefers human potatoes like you who have no ambition whatsoever beyond (a) having parents and (b) killing someone. I could have just sat around impressing people with my towering genius, but no, he had to – "

Just then he was interrupted, which was probably fortunate, as I might have tried to strangle him for one of eight or nine different reasons. Specifically, he was interrupted by the _crack _of Lakshmi appearing in the centre of the kitchen. We both jumped as per usual, then looked at one another with faintly sheepish expressions as though we'd been caught doing something embarrassing. Lakshmi regarded us curiously.

"We're just talking," Voldie barked. "Having a conversation. Is that illegal now?"

"Don't fucking start that again," I said between clenched teeth.

"I don't know," Lakshmi said distantly. "I am not familiar with the laws in this country. In any case, Mr Voldemort, I am here to rrreport on the ships, unless you would like me to return at a more favourrrable time."

"No, no, that's fine, report," Voldie ordered.

"Certainly. Mr Hottie tells me that there are certainly many magical ships, although he does not believe they will be sufficiently strong for this task. He will search for them and report back. Mrs Hong replies that she and Mr Hong will immediately start piloting the largest Chinese ship, which is presently in dock near Qingdao, and will see you in one and a half hours at Faslane."

Voldie stood and blinked. "An hour and a half? Quick, aren't they?"

"I agree, sir."

"Any other ships? Peruvians? Russians?"

"Persons of other nationalities have been sent to search for ships in their home countries, although we do not yet know whether they will find any."

"And are they reporting to Qingdao, or Faslane?"

"To Faslane. I am afraid they do not know where Qingdao is."

"Not a problem," he said absently. "Right. Excellent work, Bhattacharya. D'you want some lunch? Harry, cook something."

"All right," I said, getting out the frying pan with alacrity, although I knew Lakshmi would decline on the basis that she had a stunningly boring piece of paperwork to do; and I was only slightly wrong, because she said instead that she'd better get searching for Indian ships. I wondered if house-elves ever ate. Perhaps they were sustained by work alone.

000

The docks at Faslane had undergone a remarkable change. Most of the Chinese witches and wizards were waiting patiently for the arrival of their ship, and had decided to make their environs more comfortable. Accordingly, they had put up several multicoloured satin tents, spread out pouffes and rugs on the concrete, and were busy enjoying a picnic.

I looked at Voldemort. He blinked a few times, then said, "Well. Wish we'd thought of that when we were here before. All right, you don't really need to do anything. I'll go and talk to the Chinese; I promise not to kill anyo – "

At exactly that moment, there came a thunderous crash from Faslane Bay. Spray shot fifty feet into the air; Voldemort and me, at least two. Creamy waves smashed upon an invisible barrier and fell doucely back into the sea; from beneath them an awesome vessel became visible. It was a ship, possibly, but the Chinese Ministry must have sold Mongolia to pay for it. An enormous silver dragon snarled from the prow; the sails were bright red and appeared to be made of silk, and multicoloured lanterns hung from the end of every possible projection. In terms of extravagance it eclipsed the Durmstrang effort by a very large amount.

I glanced over at Voldie and said, "Did you know it was this big?"

He looked at me shiftily, and I noticed he was wearing the guilty face that, on him, generally accompanied an 'accident'. "Ask me later," he muttered, and surreptitiously cast some spells to clean himself up.

While I stood and stared in awe, the ship manoeuvred neatly in beside the pier thing and glided to a halt. Two monkey-shaped silver gargoyles on the side of the deck suddenly jerked into life and rolled out a little walkway, down which stepped, beaming, an ancient couple: a bloke with a beard down to his knees and a little round hat, and a woman whose back was becoming rounded by old age and must have stood about four foot eight, max. They bowed politely in our general direction, clearly not requiring a closer acquaintance with Voldemort, and began happily discharging the details of their trip upon the hooting, clapping, laughing group of Chinese.

"What are they saying?" Voldie asked impatiently. "Anything important?"

The question was relayed to the ancients, who, if that were possible, beamed even more widely. The old bloke replied through our makeshift interpreter, "I have been very well-behaved since 1880. Now look at me: I am a pirate!"


	12. Chapter 5b

**Chapter 5b**

Ships of various stripes turned up over the next two hours, most very badly piloted. The pirate, it turned out, made a much better captain than the grumpy Russians, who drove the Durmstrang ship smack into a wall, or the drunken Scandinavians in a Viking longboat, who managed to park it successfully but then fell overboard. (They sheepishly admitted that they had stopped off at Estonia to pinch some duty-free vodka.) The Peruvian woman then turned up in an astonishing Peruvian boat like a bundle of straw, which she'd driven from Lake Titicaca; her journey across the bay was alarmingly wobbly, but then, she did have the very valid excuse that she was piloting her ship single-handed. All the same, Voldemort eventually resorted to standing on top of the Vanguard submarine and giving arm signals.

A sodden Finn ambled up to me, thought for a moment and pronounced, "Good morning."

"Good morning," I agreed. She offered me the bottle. I declined.

She then stood beside me for a moment, watching Voldemort waving furiously in an attempt to stop a brilliant silver quinquereme colliding with a catamaran. His sleeves contrasted against the tentative sunshine like plumes of black smoke.

I suppose, with no wind, voices carry a long way. Momentarily we heard a faint, excited shout of "No, no, you idiot, _left_..."

The Finnish woman took one more swig of vodka and gestured towards the Dark Traffic Controller. "Voldemort..." she said, and then, either overcome or devoid of any further English vocabulary, shook her head in disbelief and trundled back to the other Scandinavians.

I thought she put it rather well.

000

"They're a very weird bunch," I observed doubtfully some time later, "to be saving the world with."

Voldemort was sprawled out next to me on an ornate Chinese rug. He gave a honk of laughter, spraying lemonade everywhere, and spluttered, "How d'you think that's different from the normal set-up?"

Eh? "What?"

"All right, put it like this," he said, settling a cushion more comfortably under his head. "When I first started in the MGB, the chap I had to report to was an ex-Comdiv of the Red Army. Before he got his leg shot off he used to command a division of sixteen thousand people. And then I would go back to Britain and delegate all my various evil deeds to people like dear old Bella and Lucius, who had commanded precisely no people, and whose CVs contained... well... nothing."

I lay back and closed my eyes. The gentle sun licked my eyelids while I pondered this. "The witzy world's very small compared with the Muggles," I observed.

"We're small fry, Harry. We really are. Secrecy is our only defence, really... I always found it very odd when your side wondered what the Death Eaters' tactics were and where we'd learnt them. Our strategy was precisely the same as the Witzyworld's always used, writ on a smaller scale. Clandestine activity, guerrilla warfare..."

"I don't want to know how the Death Eaters kill people, thanks," I said firmly.

There was a long silence. I opened one eye to see him staring at me speculatively with the narrowed eyes that I had come to associate with imminent ghastly lectures. "I don't want to talk about politics AT ALL," I shouted before he could get his mouth open, "pretty much ever, because they bore me to tears."

"Ah, Harry," he said, stretching out on the rug like a basking shark, "the universal nice-person's aversion to telling others what to do. Sadly, the only people who enjoy politics are those who are hated by the rest of the populace, which is why all the world's governments are up shit creek."

"What about you?" I said absently, meaning the Death Eaters.

"Me? I'm not a government, am I? Unless I secede from the United Kingdom and declare my own nation..."

"Transylvoldemort," I suggested.

"Transylvoldemort, and Nova Pottia. That would do."

"You would be supreme ruler," I observed. "There'd be nobody more important than you."

"Would Nova Pottia declare war on me?" he said suspiciously.

"Are you taking the piss?" I spluttered. "There's been enough wars."

"And the various Ministries of Magic are very strict about national sovereignty. Ah, I begin to like the sound of this."

"No-one could ever disagree with you."

"And no minions to mess things up. Mmm."

I was beginning to say that he should really consider putting this idea into practice after the war, and the head-washing be damned, but two shadows moved over us; and their owners turned out to be Svetlana-Chubby-Ginger and Yevfimy-Greybeard, and the happy mood evaporated. "What?" Voldemort said irritably in Russian, and there followed another interminable argument, during which I sat and fidgeted and finally went to sleep on the cushions; I would rather have gone to the extreme other end of the docks, or, indeed, back to Wales, but felt it would be unfair to abandon poor old Voldemort.

I drifted off on my cushions and had a very odd set of dreams, cruel dreams in which Voldie was his scary old self and threatened me with death and torture and madness and god knows what else; but all the time a part of my consciousness was saying in a puzzled voice, "But he's right here, next to you. The sun's shining. You're in Scotland," and then it in its turn was drowned out by the real Voldie's voice saying "Harry. Harry," and his warm hand on my shoulder.

"Have they gone?" I said sleepily, rubbing my eyes and licking stale lemonade off my lips. "I thought they'd never bugger off."

"You weren't the only one. I didn't kill them, though."

"I've changed my mind. You can kill them," I said, rolling over and sitting up; and fortunately he just chuckled. Then he stopped chuckling and started filing his claws again.

"They're worried about the Vanishing Spell pocket universe," he said unenthusiastically. "They think it's a specific, single place. That is, that all the Vanished objects are stored higgledy-piggledy together. So those two, since they show signs of understanding nuclear physics, are worried that either the missiles will have detonated there, or that the gradual accumulation of all that plutonium will cause an explosion anyway. Oh, and everything would be irradiated, obviously."

"Can't be," I said.

He gave me a Look. "Why can't it?"

"Because my bits don't glow in the dark."

There was a pause, and I elucidated, "You Vanished my bits, the second day we were here. Then you Restored them. They're not irradiated, so..."

Voldie's non-eyebrows shot up; so did his wand. He pointed it at my crotch, then hesitated.

"Mmm," he said. "Ahem. The Röntgen Charm detects radiation by causing affected areas to glow green. I won't be able to see it through your trousers, so if you could, er..."

"Pull the other one!" I said, unable to believe my ears. "Use the Aobnmetp thing!"

"The _how-_much?What gibberish are you talking now? How I wish I'd never aimed at your skull when I cast that Killing Curse!"

"The yellow thing called Aobnmetp that measures radiation!"

He mumbled "aobnmetp" to himself a few times, then finally glared at me, made the yellow thing appear from nowhere, and said "Are you talking about the _dosimeter_, Harry, which says _ДOЗИMETP _on it?"

"Yes! Look, it says on!"

"Dear god, illiterate as well as stupid! Pull your top up."

I obligingly pulled up my T-shirt. Voldemort switched on the dosimeter, took the phone in one hand and, with the other, reached matter-of-factly for the waistband of my underpants. I screeched in horror, vetoed that plan and started a long argument, which was finally resolved by my undoing my fly and letting him wave the phone over my undies. The soft chattering of the dosimeter proved that my privates remained unsullied, and Voldemort was extremely satisfied.

"Well, that proves it," he decided, plonking the dosimeter down next to a cloisonné opium pipe. "The things we Vanish can't be all stored in one big heap, or, if they are, the plutonium isn't irradiating things and the bombs haven't gone off. Excellent. We'll have to show the Russians immediately, except, erm," he coughed apologetically, "perhaps we should Vanish something more, er, innocuous and restore that instead..."

"I AM NOT FLASHING MY BITS AT THE RUSSIANS."

"Well. No... So if I Vanish a lump of rock and Restore it, that should satisfy them. And, er, yes. Thank you."

"You're welcome." I sat up, drank some more lemonade and looked round at our meagre fleet. The harbour was now dotted with magical ships. The sight was bizarre: some were much bigger than others, all were much smaller than the subs that surrounded them, and none was moving. There was no tide to necessitate a rope or an anchor, and no waves to bob them up and down. They sat scattered across the motionless waves like the abandoned Lego of a giant child. "What are we doing now?"

"Figuring out which subs to dredge up," he said gloomily, tapping his claws on the dosimeter. "All the ships are here, except for the one that Albert thought he might be bringing, and I bet he can't get it to work, anyway, so... We've had an argument about which detection system to use, but we'll skip that. According to the data at Menwith, there should be a sub a bit south of Iceland, so we're going to aim for that one. It's one of the other two Vanguard submarines, the British ones. They're called Vindictive and Vainglorious, or something else beginning with V."

"Voldemort?" I suggested.

He looked at me suspiciously. "I hope you're not actually calling me vindictive and vainglorious?"

"Well, you are."

A Chinese witch sat down next to Voldemort, picked up his dosimeter with a puzzled expression and tried to inhale through the phone. Voldemort silently removed it and handed her the opium set, then said, "True. And there are American and Russian subs; we'll leave them till later... So, they basically trap the sub in a great big net," he said glumly, "and tow it to the surface."

"And crash it into the pier."

"Yevfimy and co. will _not _be steering... Where are you going?"

"I'm not staying here if she's smoking," I objected, standing up. "I hate fag smoke, it gives me a headache."

Voldemort's face contorted into an expression of profound intellectual agony. "Potter, she's _not actually smoking opium_. It's a _bubble _pipe."

"Oh," I said, watching as the Chinese woman exhaled a stream of huge pink and turquoise bubbles, which wobbled delicately along the lines of picnickers and quietly froze over the sea. Illuminated by the slow sun, they were really quite beautiful. I sat down again and enjoyed the colours until I heard Voldemort snicker.

I rolled my eyes at him. "Look," I pointed out, "that bubble _isn't_ popping. It doesn't need a bubble wheelchair or anything..."

"That one's me," said Voldemort. He added as an afterthought, "Actually, they're all me."

Some shouting, laughing Finns and Russians started playing tennis with the bubbles, Banishing them back and forth towards each other. It soon became clear that none of them was a proper Beater. I snorted and was about to comment on their poor technique when I saw that some of the dead bubbles, frozen on the water in the middle of the bay, were moving.

The sea swirled. Its surface trembled. Then a great bronze... _thing_... swelled out of the water like the rising head of a hippopotamus. Two enormous metal hoops rose inexorably above the dock, resolving themselves, no less perplexingly, into the strangest ship I'd ever seen in my life (not that I'm any sort of expert, I suppose). It would be impossible to describe, so I won't try. All I could think was that it was not recognisably Western, or Chinese, or Middle Eastern, or anything, really. God only knew which culture had produced this leviathan.

A small, dark figure on the bow vanished with a _crack_. An even smaller dark figure, which had been hovering in mid-air beside him, followed suit. I identified Albert and Lakshmi long before they Apparated beside Voldemort, nodded politely and said, "Good evening."

"Hottie," said Voldemort in an unignorable voice. "What's that thing?"

Albert raised an eyebrow. "A ship, I believe," he said, as the Russians and Chinese gaped. "I liberated it from the Angolan Ministry. If yeu don't like it, I can always take it bek?"

000

So at last our mighty fleet was assembled, and fuck me, what a sight it was. I don't really know much about boats, but we had amassed three junks, two catamarans, a Viking longboat, a Peruvian thing made of reeds, an Egyptian thing made of papyrus, five Western-style ships of various types and a dhow; plus, of course, Albert's Angolan thing, about which there is nothing more to say. Voldemort, gloomily deciding that the operation could be postponed no further, gave the magical equivalent of a slideshow presentation; he coaxed a white marble column out of the naval concrete, sat on top of it and created various moving pictures on its flat front.

"... We've got various issues to consider, such as navigating the ships, the need for careful handling of the subs, the spells we're going to use to manoeuvre them. – Someone cast a Sobering Spell on the Finns. Thank you..."

I wasn't needed for any of this. I had thought that perhaps Voldemort might like some moral support; but if so, he hadn't mentioned it, and in general he seemed to be doing rather well. He hadn't collapsed, screamed or wet himself, at any rate. The presentation was a bit basic, even for me, so I just sat on a rug fifty yards away, basked in the sun, and bit my nails.

"... NO, for god's sake, a submarine is NOT a big fish. It's a machine. A ship. A big tin can full of Muggles..."

My nails became tiny and perfect. I wondered what to do next. I thought about life for a long time while Voldemort laboriously explained about plutonium, driving his message home with a lot of moving pictures of subs exploding and killing everyone around them. Eventually I found myself arranging little pebbles on the concrete.

Attached to a small piece of grit, I discovered an ant. It was frozen, of course, and about a third of the size of the boulder it was dragging along. I gazed at it for a while and thought of Robert the Bruce watching his spider.

"_Why _does it glow in the dark? _Because it's fucking radioactive_. No, it's _not _magical. It's a completely natural phenomenon..."

Like Robert the Bruce, I eventually had some profound thoughts. My profound thoughts ran thus:

Being powerful is a very lonely business. Here are the most powerful magicians in the world (and me on their coat-tails for some reason, despite the fact that the boat in Voldie's Horcrux-hidey-hole didn't notice I existed), and they don't even have an animate ant to keep them company.

The ant reminded me amusingly of our little boats tugging an enormous nuclear submarine along behind them. Perhaps we weren't so powerful after all.

I kind of wanted to help it carry its piece of grit, but I had no idea where it was going or what it wanted to use it for, so that wasn't much use; which just reminded me dismally that it's easy to stomp on things, but very difficult to help them.

Anyway: Voldemort's crash course in nuclear submarines came to an end; the crews milled between their respective ships with excited shouts and much amateur interpreting. I could keep track of Voldemort by his shiny bonce, which bobbed up and down periodically among the rabble as he gave orders; it was a good thing he was so tall. I couldn't see what I was supposed to do, so I just sat and remained submerged in the crowd.

Once I thought I saw a little blue glow in the porthole of one of the ships; but it was so faint it was impossible to tell whether it had been anything supernatural.

At last the ships began to gurgle off into the Gare Loch, leaving great dark whirlpools and frozen waves; the shouting and bustling slowly diminished until the last Chinese bloke walked onto the deck of his ship, waved at Voldemort and disappeared into the hold. Voldie looked around with a perplexed expression and finally noticed me sitting on my rug; as the ship smashed down into the ocean he came striding over, robes sweeping away.

"I forgot about you for a while," he said. "Are you all right?"

"Never better. Well done for your slide show – don't tread on my ant!"

"Dear god, I'm not allowed to tread on _ants _now?!"

"Yes, just that one."

"Nutter. – Thank you. Really, it was pretty much all right. I'm never happier than when I'm telling people how useless and incompetent they are... I take it I can sit here, can I? No _ants?_"

"Yes, you can. – So that's why the Death Eaters keep fucking things up."

"Bitch."

"Yep. Are we going back to Wales now, or do we stay here?" I asked as he folded his legs neatly onto the rug next to me.

"I think we'd better stay here," he said glumly. "I won't be any happier in Wales, anyway. I'd only worry about what was happening here."

"D'you want anything to eat?"

"No. Stress upsets my stomach."

This sentence sounded so silly coming from a Dark Lord that I sniggered all the time we were playing noughts and crosses, and after issuing various dire warnings he finally got fed up with me and cast Rictusempra. While I was spastic and helpless on the rug I noticed him looking around uneasily; when I finally managed to stop guffawing he was definitely glum.

"I wish all those people were still around," he said nervously.

"They – hee hee! – can't be, can they?" I said practically, wiping away tears of laughter. "We need them to – ha! – drive the ships."

This did not appear to reassure him; he carried on fidgeting worriedly. I sat up, put my arm around his shoulders and patted his bony body. He reciprocated rather mechanically. It didn't appear to help.

"Look, just don't think about it," I cooed soothingly. "Think about something – hee! – else for five minutes. Sing a song or something..."

"What shall I sing?" he said in leaden tones.

"Ten Green Bottles," I said randomly.

In a voice like ashes falling from the sky, he sang nervously, "Ten green bottles... sitting on the wall. Ten green bottles... sitting on the wall. And if one nuclear warhead... should accidentally fall... There'll be no green bottles... sitting on the wall."

I couldn't admonish him for this rather gloomy choice of lyric, because at that moment there was a great roar from Faslane Bay. Waves surged forwards and froze, forming a giant crater of water, and masts reared up from the sea; moments later our fleet of magic ships was heaving into view, with between them, caught in a glowing net, the Vanguard submarine. Gulliver had been snared by the Lilliputians.

Any belief that Voldemort was sanguine about this development, however, would be sadly unfounded. As the noise first rang out he levitated three feet into the air. His arm was still around my shoulders, and as he jumped he suddenly clutched my throat so tightly that I choked and went temporarily blind. We sprawled across the concrete and I managed to extricate my neck from his grip. While my headache was fading and my vision returned, I made out that the nuclear monster was trapped in the bay and that Voldemort, far from pouncing on me to rip my throat out, was bending over and coughing helplessly; coughing up blood.

"Oh my god," I said, forgetting my sore neck immediately and grabbing his shoulders. "Have you got radiation sickness?"

He stared at me in wide-eyed, naked fear, at his blood all over my fingers, at my terrified face. I prodded his face to see if it would instantly bruise, show that it was all over. It didn't.

"_Accio dosimeter_," I said feebly, and it came sailing across the concrete and landed neatly in my palm.

It said there crackling as peacefully as a kitchen fire. I shoved the phone anxiously into Voldemort's face. No change.

He began to breathe again, and looked a little calmer. "What on earth did you go and say that for? Of course I'm not... hah..." he ran out of breath again and had to lean on my shoulder.

"You started bleeding out of nowhere," I mumbled, feeling ridiculous. "I thought it must be, you know." I pulled out my wand and cleaned the blood off our hands and robes.

Voldemort did a few experimental coughs and prodded his breastbone. "When I'm frightened there's this pain in my chest. I think I must have ruptured something."

The tension over the last few days had been unbearable. The concept of poor old Voldemort straining hard enough to give himself internal injuries, and the sight of fresh blood, made it worse; so as the various motley crews walked across the concrete, calling out to him for instructions, we can perhaps be forgiven for breaking down in hysterics.


	13. Chapter 5c

**Queer Fish: Chapter 5c**

_(Note: _Gabzies kindly drew a picture of Harry and Voldie getting pissed and dressing in women's underwear, which can be found at http://i16 dot tinypic dot com/623av0n.jpg. Thank you, Gabzies.)

At some unidentifiable time that "night", which wasn't a night, I lay flat on my back on the floor of the kitchen in Wales. The flagstones were blessedly cool, just right for soothing my hot and bothered body and brain. I'd tried opening the back door, but soon discovered there was no point; it only admitted sunlight, and there could be no breeze.

_Crack_. Voldie Apparated outside and walked into the kitchen, stepping over me casually. "Is he dead?" he asked the world at large. "Must have been suicide. There's not a mark on him. All right, we've finished now, Harry. All done."

"Excellent," I said, getting up with alacrity and making a bee-line for the fire. One thing to be said for temporal stasis spells, they made it unbelievably easy to keep someone's tea waiting for them. Just step far enough away and the food stayed perfect for hours. Wished I'd had it all those years when Uncle Vernon kept being late. "Any more disasters and fights?"

"No, and don't sound so cheerful about it... Look, you were allowed to eat yours _before _I arrived," he said, surveying my frenzied attack on the pot of soup. "You don't have to eat with me at all."

"You Dark Lords don't understand good manners," I informed him, doling out the soup into beautiful Welsh stoneware.

"Clearly not. Or perhaps we just don't want to watch teenage boys eating like deranged German Shepherds. I would do a straw poll of other Dark Lords, but I killed them all. Let's eat."

We downed the meal in an amicable silence, which was broken only by Voldie's singing "La, la, la" while he ground pepper into his soup. Evidently he had temporarily cheered up. I prayed devoutly that this state would persist.

Then I started thinking about other things. "Voldie," I said at last, "seeing as it's the end of the world and everything, shouldn't we be getting pissed and dressing in women's underwear and so on?"

He laughed for an incredibly long time, then said "I've heard of the drink scenario, but women's underwear is a new one on me."

"Oh, I saw it in some film."

"Ah, different generations," he said. "The chaps in the films when _I _was young just bonked the sex symbols, they didn't bother trying their knickers on first. Which film was it, by the way?" he asked, visibly booting up Voldie's Big Nuclear War Database, and I had to describe every detail I could remember until we finally decided it wasn't about nuclear war after all.

"Well, we can get drunk, anyway."

"Oh yes, definitely," he said; and then, as I yawned hugely, "but not now, I think."

"I'm glad all those people have gone," I confided. "It got really fucking knackering."

Voldie found this a strangely amusing concept, and laughed at me. "Am I not a person?" he enquired. "Or are you pleased to be left to your happy home life with Lord Voldemort?"

"It means I'm knackered," I said firmly, downing the last drops of my soup. "And don't talk about yourself in the third person, you sound like Bob Dole."

That set him off all over again, and while I was on the toilet I could hear him cackling away at the other end of the house. It didn't last, though. When I returned to the kitchen I found he'd gone. I finally located him in one of the many bedrooms, opening the windows and peering worriedly out at the garden. When I made a slight noise he jumped and looked round wildly.

"Are you all right?" I said as gently as possible, in the manner of one talking to a little lost bear cub.

Voldie hunched his back and played uneasily with his claws. "I keep listening for missiles," he confessed.

"There aren't any missiles coming," I assured him, "because all the Muggles are frozen. You can see that, can't you? The trees aren't waving around in the wind or anything."

He raised an eyebrow and gave me the ghost of a pitying look, which was a great relief. "Can't you just laugh at me as usual and call me a moron?" he said. "It's so much more frightening when you talk in that very soft voice as if I'm totally loony."

"Well, you are," I said, placing a hand in the middle of his back and steering him firmly back towards the kitchen. "And I don't want you to feel bad. It makes me feel sorry for you. Read one of your horrible books."

"Oh, I don't think I could face one of the horrible ones," he said with a shiver.

"They _all _are," I complained. "They're all about a foot thick with twenty numbers at the bottom of every page."

Voldie laughed until he cried while I did the washing-up. Then he read _Nuke Box Jury: Could A World Court End Nuclear War? _This presumably made him feel better, because by the time I finished cleaning the bath I could hear him whistling again; when I walked into the kitchen he slapped the book down on his little table, put his feet up on a pouffe and said matter-of-factly, "Turns out a prophecy _was _made about the war."

Before I could say "Oh no, not those stupid prophecies again," he continued, "Guess where it was kept?"

"Er. Somewhere we can't get to," I said.

"Quite the contrary, we could get there very easily."

"Oh. British Ministry? You could go there on your own," I suggested, "or I suppose I could go with you if it was very important – what?" I said, because he was chuckling at me and shaking his head pityingly; and I finally realised, "Oh. You said, guess where it _was _kept?"

"_Now _you're getting there, Potter."

I envisaged the fight in the Department of Ministries. "Smash shelves," my past self muttered to Hermione, and then there was a great crash as dozens of prophecies shattered; so I said, "Oops."

"Yep."

"Look, WHY are the bloody things made of GLASS?! They _always _get broken..."

"Doesn't matter," Voldie assured me. "I was getting too obsessed with prophecies anyway. However. Yevfimy and Svetlana, as you can imagine, had a good gloat at my expense, and I told them to get on with defusing bombs and stop being so childish..."

"Well done," I said, amazed.

"Oh, _thank _you! Well, anyway, the concept sprang to mind quite easily, because the Americans and Russians, in squabbling with each other over dogma and power and 'manhood' and so forth, have accidentally destroyed the world; and we two, in silly and childish attempts to kill each other, have accidentally destroyed anything that could actually be of any use."

We had? "What?"

"Anything that could help us with the present situation. Your side destroyed the prophecy – one point to me," he said, counting on his fingers. "I killed Amelia Bones – one point to you. Dumbledore destroyed the Philosopher's Stone – one point to me... and then there's the fact nobody trusts me because I'm a genocidal maniac, but I'm not sure whether that's hurting or helping. I think our amassed stooges seem much more inclined to listen to a maniac than a nonentity; look at the way they treat Albert."

I tried to think this over. It didn't seem to have occurred to him that the maniac/nonentity situation might not actually be either/or. Also, I vaguely resented being cast as America or Russia; I was more inclined to see him as Germany and me as Poland. One thing above all was bothering me, though: "What's the Philosopher's Stone got to do with it?" I said in tangled perplexity; someone appeared to have knitted my brain. "You mentioned it yesterday, to Albert – "

"I could have used it to get rid of the plutonium," Voldemort said tersely. "Possibly, anyway, although in practice it would have taken years of research."

"What?" I said. "It makes you live forever and it turned lead to gold. Nobody mentioned anything about it getting rid of plutonium!"

Voldemort gave me a horrible crimson stare. "Hello, Potter, if it can turn lead to gold it can turn plutonium into protactinium."

"...," I said.

"Oh, god!" he said. "It can reduce the number of protons in the – you do know what the Periodic Table is, don't you?"

"Yes! Well... sort of..."

Words, it appeared, were not enough for this situation. Voldemort sat temporarily speechless, then launched himself up from the table, knocking over the chair in the process, and performed a violent war-dance in which he leapt about like a scarecrow and hooted and screeched with rage. It was a remarkable sight. I wondered if he was going to kill and eat me.

"Right," he seethed when he'd finished. "Here is the Periodic Table," and he lifted his wand and drew a U-shaped thing in mid-air, with a blob hanging above it. "There's hydrogen – " he jabbed his wand at the blob – "and there's the noble gases, there's the transition metals, blah, blah, blah. Does this look vaguely familiar?"

"Yes," I said doubtfully.

He rolled his eyes to the heavens and made horrid jerking motions with his claws in mid-air, since he couldn't tear his hair out. "Quite. But you are familiar with the existence of lead, gold, nitrogen, oxygen, copper?"

Watching each little square light up in a different colour as he mentioned its name, I said, "Yes. They're elements."

"Well done," he said with the utmost sarcasm. "Now, here is lead, element number 91. Here is gold, 88." They lit up obligingly. "The Philosopher's Stone has the power to strip protons from the nucleus of an element, to move a substance up the Periodic Table, and possibly down it as well, although I never had the chance to find out. Now, here are uranium and plutonium, down here in the actinides at the bottom." The actinides duly glowed. "Getting the idea yet, Potter?"

"You could use the Philosopher's Stone to turn plutonium into lead," I concluded.

He calmed down, and sat down, too. "Well. I don't know about lead. Maybe we ought to aim a little lower. But yes, it can basically transmute the elements; it works like a particle accelerator, except it's not five miles long and doesn't cost a billion quid."

I unravelled my brain a bit more and said, "I thought you said Ageing Spells would work."

He closed his eyes, lay back in his chair and said, "I take back everything I just thought to myself about your intelligence. OF COURSE THEY WOULDN'T WORK."

"They wouldn't? Why not?"

He gnashed his fangs and said, "Possibly because the isotopes used for nuclear weapons have half-lives of," he took a breath, "twenty-four thousand years, a hundred and sixty thousand years, and seven million years."

"And that's too long."

A squeal of appalled laughter. "Of course it's too long!"

"Well, you said a Flame-Freezing Charm could protect you against thirty thousand degrees," I explained, "and to me it's all just numbers."

"It is, isn't it?" he agreed wearily. "An Ageing Spell is normally cast in terms of years, perhaps decades. Extraordinarily, centuries. And even if I could make a dent in the plutonium, what would it decay into, Potter?"

"Something even worse," I said immediately.

"No. Uranium-235. But you were nearly right."

"Cool," I said, pleased by the resurgence of my intellect. "But the Philosopher's Stone would have worked. OK. Great."

"Yes," he agreed, then looked shifty and mumbled, "well. Sort of."

"What?" I said suspiciously.

He ducked his head and mumbled apologetically, "Itcouldtheoretically turnleadintoplutonium aswell."

"What?"

He cleared his throat. "It could also be used to add protons. To turn lead into plutonium. Theoretically."

"_Ah,_" I said.

"Mm-hm."

"And Nicolas Flamel didn't, like, mention this at any point?" I said, dazed.

"Ah, now, that's the point," Voldemort said with enthusiasm. "In eight hundred years of using the Stone, he never once mentioned radioactivity. So, we have Hypothesis 1, which that he was the stupidest man in the world..."

"Oi," I said, glaring at him.

"What? Did you know him? I didn't know you knew him."

"I didn't. He made the Stone and you never have, so you shouldn't slag him off, that's all."

He stared at me with awful pertinacity and said "You like him because he was Dumbledore's friend."

"Why not?!"

"Oh, for fuck's sake, Potter," he howled, "here we go again. You don't have to be the knight in shining armour for every one of his bloody friends! We'd be here forever! You never even met him!"

"Well, if you didn't insult him IN THE FIRST PLACE!"

"Well, that's what I was SAYING!" he shouted with great triumph. "The _first _argument is that he was the thickest man in the world and never once thought 'I wonder what happens if you _add _protons to a nucleus?' or whatever people who use Philosopher's Stone think, I mean, we don't know precisely how it works. Now, the _second _argument is that he was the _brainiest _man in the world," he said, suddenly deflating with a sigh, "and he saw all this coming."

"So he kept it quiet."

"May have done."

"And didn't make any plutonium."

"I don't know about that. As far as I know, Dumbledore" (did he have to spit the name as if he was a lump of used chewing gum?) "never knew anything about nuclear physics beyond the most superficial practical applications. He had a vague idea the Muggles had big bombs and power stations. Flamel, obviously, he lived in total secrecy, so I've no idea."

"Or you'd have nicked his Stone."

"Yep."

"And got rid of plutonium with it?"

That elicited an unusual silence. Voldemort's eyes focussed on invisible spectres. His brow furrowed and he abstractedly bit on his knuckles, looking suddenly and confusingly feminine.

I grew impatient, and demanded suspiciously, "Are you being neurotic again?"

That startled a giggle out of him. He eventually admitted, "I would have had to destroy the Stone."

"Why?!"

He rolled his eyes in supreme impatience. "To stop it falling into the hands of people who might use it to make actinides!"

"What are actinides?" I said absently, then, without waiting for a reply, "But you wanted it, to live forever!"

He contorted his face with the utmost hatred and said "You can't have everything you want in life, Potter. You can get rid of the bloody thing, or you can leave it knocking about in a world where people want to make weapons with it! It's a pretty fucking simple decision!" he shouted in frustration.

"But you want to live forever. More than anything else," I said in disbelief. "Although I suppose you've got Horcruxes..."

"You don't know as much about Horcruxes as you think you do. And for god's sake, Potter, listen to yourself! Would I live forever if there was a war? – I couldn't make the Elixir of Life if the Earth was a giant cinder. Would I _want _to live forever? No! It's simple! Simple!" he shouted, huffing furiously through his non-nose.

"You might have just locked it up somewhere so no-one could ever get at it."

"Yes, that really worked when Dumbledore was after my Horcruxes," he snarled; and then, improbably, sniggered. "I might have temporised," he admitted. "I might have convinced myself that nobody would find it for a few years, and put off making a decision... no, no, I would just never have tried taking the Elixir in the first place. What if it was addictive? Or simply highly enjoyable? It wouldn't be worth the temptation."

"True," I admitted.

"Besides," he said, shooting me a hostile glance, "what are you talking about – not believing me? You're still here, aren't you?"

"What?" I said, lost.

"You're still alive. I haven't killed you! You're the one who's prophesised to kill me, if you remember, but you're still here! I could have finished you off when I first met you," he said, staring, upset, into the middle distance, "but this was more important..."

Then, before I knew it, he'd jumped off his chair, run across the room and started banging his head violently against the top of a six-foot bookcase. I leapt to my feet and ran over to him; put my arms around him and tried to drag him away. He pushed me away violently and carried on. Briefly I felt a great desire to leave him to it, or just to whack him over the head with a brick and hasten the process, but I tried again and managed to squeeze myself between him and the bookcase. At this he became still and I stood there silently hugging his body and observing the extreme scrawniness of his waist; I would like to say that I was silence out of sensitivity and good judgement, but in fact it was because I couldn't think of anything to say. I didn't have much to offer except Quidditch-Toned Muscles (TM) and body heat, so I gave them generously while meditating on my lack of sympathy and understanding. I ought to be able to soothe Voldemort, but I couldn't; I only knew how to bash him to bits. I supposed this was the same problem as smashing the prophecy and destroying the Stone and so on, and that it applied to nuclear wars as well, in that the various governments had invested a lot more in weaponry than they had in education and diplomacy and stuff; and now we would all have to learn how to be nice to each other, or else die horribly. At least, I thought, cheering up, I was doing better at it than poor old Voldemort.

"Anyway," he said at last in quite a normal voice, shrugging me off like a random encumbrance, "you're here, and the Philosopher's Stone isn't, and we're doing quite well, really. What's for dessert?"


	14. Hi John

**Chapter 6: Hi John**

I was woken by a loud clanging noise. While I lay there wondering what it might have been, I was treated to an extra clang, followed by a crash and a clatter. All were coming from the garden.

I hurried outside in my pants to find a furious Voldemort striding around the flowerbeds in various random directions, grabbing hold of whatever came to hand. I arrived in time to see him snatch the top half of a buddleia and shake it violently; he then gave it a good kick and stalked off in the opposite direction. Judging from the assorted items spread across the lawn, he had already kicked a compost bin, a wheelbarrow and a big coil of rope.

Catching sight of me, he stopped, glared and shouted, "Not real. None of it! Not real!"

Dear god. "Calm down, Voldie," I said wearily, taking hold of his arm and steering him towards the kitchen. "Of course it's bloody real. We're in the house in Wales..."

"How d'you _know?" _he demanded. "It could be wrong! It could be answers!"

"You're off your fucking head," I said, my temper starting to give way as I realised how thirsty and groggy and generally early-morning I was. I hadn't noticed till now, since I'd believed some sort of emergency was under way, but _really. _"There's nothing going wrong. We're not even getting attacked by dragons. Get back to bed!"

"It's not real!" he wailed. "The sun doesn't move! _Nothing _moves! It's like artificial reality. Like living on a film set!"

"So _what?!_" I said. "It's been like this since you cast the fucking stasis spell, and it's not like we're frozen in the middle of the night and it's raining. It's a lovely morning and the sun's shining, so stop complaining!"

"I can't cope with it," he lamented. "I can't relax..."

"Just do whatever you normally do all day!... What _do _you normally do?"

"Kill Muggles," he said with a sudden, improbable giggle. "But I suppose that's no good... Oh, Harry, I can't stand it, I can't switch off and be normal like you can," he moaned, allowing me to settle him down at the breakfast bar.

"Just read a book or something," I said in exasperation, but looking through the shelves, I couldn't find anything apart from reed beds, nuclear physics and _Woman's Own. _I chucked the _Woman's Own _at him and got on with cooking breakfast, employing maximum discontented pan-rattling; I think he got the point.

After a few minutes he said, "Cancer. Mercury moving into your sign this week means a possible financial windfall – good news if you've been saving up for that particular little black dress. As for personal relations, do you really have to be quite so selfish? You may think you're acting in everyone's best interest, but try examining your motivations more closely. Oh, and your lucky colour is blue."

"I'm a Leo, Voldie."

"Doesn't matter, this is dated May 1995."

"Well, it's not much use then, is it?!"

"I thought it was remarkably accurate," he cackled. "Saving up for a little black dress? It was only last night you proposed wearing lingerie."

"Oh, eff off."

He sniggered away to himself while progressing through the recipes, and called out, "Raspberry tart, couscous thing with almonds, pears in cinnamon sauce."

"Excuse me, I know how to cook!" I snorted, chopping up mushrooms.

"I don't. Perhaps I should start learning... HA!" he suddenly shouted very loudly, causing me to slice a large hole in my hand; so everything had to be adjourned while he apologised profusely and cast a spell called _Salutifera _to heal the cut; "but," he enthused, "I've just realised! I could make myself a Calming Draught! That'll sort out the problem, and it'll keep me out of your hair while you make the breakfast. I'll just suck your blood off the mushrooms," and off he went, singing loudly.

I was not comforted by this outburst. Singing!Voldie was an alarming phenomenon, and I had no data on whether he was good at Potions. I also had the feeling that if bog-standard Calming Draughts were likely to have any effect, someone would have tried them on him before now. Still, I thought, as loud clanking and rattling noises emanated from one of the spare bedrooms, it would stop him from startling me and making me cut my hand for the next few minutes; so I carried on with the fry-up. I was just getting some courgettes out of the larder when the whole of the corridor that led to the bedrooms lit up blue.

I stood frozen to the spot for a moment with a courgette in my hand, wishing I had some clothes on and unable to decide what I was frightened about most. Then I heard the clanking continue in Voldemort's laboratory and my heart started beating again just in time for a stout, middle-aged-looking bloke to run into the kitchen. He was white, but so heavily tanned that his lips were twice as pale as the rest of his face; this made him look oddly as though he were wearing pale pink lipstick.

He didn't look aggressive, but you could never tell; I raised my wand, cast a Shielding Charm and poised myself ready to spring sideways in the event of a Killing Curse. He looked astonished.

"Hell, I'm not gonna attack you! Are you the wizard?" he demanded in a North American accent. (Note: like most Britons, I was quite incapable of distinguishing between American and Canadian accents.)

"No," I said, bemused. "You're probably after Voldemort."

"You're a Muggle?" he said, confused.

"No, but – "

"I'm here," Vol said from behind him in a voice like a glacier scraping along bedrock; and the man swung round and gave a tremendous start of fright, which as far as I was concerned was quite unwarranted.

"What ARE you?!" he demanded.

"What am I?" said Voldemort, far from pleased. "I'm a human like yourself, you bumbling fool. Do you mean, Who am I? I AM LORD VOLDEMORT. And this is Harry," he added as an afterthought.

"John Pritchard," he said, still shaken.

"Well? Have you brought any news?" Voldie said, his little nostrils flaring hopefully. "Which country are you from?"

"Do _I _bring any news?" the man yelled, recovering from the shock and inflating like a mushroom cloud. "What, don't you know what's happening? I thought it was you that had cast this damn spell!"

"It was I."

"Will you calm down?" I interjected.

"How old are you?" John said suspiciously.

Voldie raised the bit of skin where one eyebrow would be if he had any. "I am sixty-nine."

"Sixty-nine!" he balked. "Barely into middle age! No sixty-nine-year-old could have cast this spell!"

There was an awful silence in which Voldemort made himself slowly taller and taller in the manner of an angry owl. When he seemed to be at least eight feet tall, he drew up his lip magnificently and sneered, "It is a delayed action spell. I put it in place when I was twenty-eight."

John fluttered his hands about as if plucking invisible birds from the air, then shouted, punctuating with stamps of one foot, "THAT – IS – IM – POSSIBLE!"

That was a bad move. Voldie extruded a wand instantaneously from his hand the way a cat unsheathes its claws. John's wand appeared equally abruptly from under his waistcoat. Voldie shot a huge, blood-red sphere of magic at him; John whipped a protective shield up just in time, but still staggered back under the impact. "FUCKING STOP THAT!" I yelled, jumping in between them with my arms splayed out like a scarecrow; "We might need him for something!", and John did not appear to find this at all reassuring, because he sprinted out of the back door and Voldie sprinted after him, with me running after on my little short legs.

"I am a Dark Lord!" he was roaring after John. "D'you think I'm concerned with your piffling little notions of what's possible and what isn't? I stopped this war! I stopped the PLANET! I am greater than Slytherin, greater than Merlin; I am the king of war, and the prince of peace! I am the first! The last! The greatest! I AM LORD VOLDEMORT!"

John, understandably, decided that sticking around and listening to all this was a bad idea, and at the end of the garden he melted away in a slow pulse of blue light. Voldie fired off a couple of AKs, apparently just for fun, and stood there with a self-satisfied expression.

"Have you quite finished now?" I panted, finally catching up with him. "You're not supposed to try and kill them!"

"I didn't! I just thought I'd shout at him for being a prick. Fancy not having heard of me, the silly bastard. And did he just vanish in a load of blue light then, or was it my imagination?"

"He did," I said, bending over and massaging a stitch in my side. "That's how he arrived, too. I was terrified."

"Huh," said Voldie. "So that's the mysterious blue light we were both so scared of. What an unbelievable anticlimax; he was quite useless. Is breakfast ready?"

He marched back to the house. I limped after him in disbelief. "No, it's not," I shouted. "And you're not _supposed_ to yell at them and drive them off! He could have been someone important!"

"Rubbish!" he snorted. "Besides, it was all his fault. He shouldn't have asked such stupid questions, and he was wearing a horrible waistcoat." With that, he vanished inside and slammed the back door.

I limped towards the kitchen in my undies, quite speechless. I suddenly noticed I was still holding the courgette.

If I were John, I reasoned, I would sneak back carefully towards the house, avoiding the red-eyed maniac and heading for the relatively sensible person in the kitchen. To this end, I used the Flagrate charm to write a message just outside the back door reading HI, JOHN. PLEASE SNEAK INTO THE KITCHEN. (BE CAREFUL) Then I got dressed, brushed my teeth and went back to cooking, as by this time I was seriously hungry. Perhaps, I thought hopefully, John would dawdle until Voldemort had drunk his calming-down potion, and I'd had my breakfast.

Alas, no such luck. As I added the onions there was a faint knock on the back door and an American voice whispered hopefully, "Has he gone yet?"

"He's making potions in one of the bedrooms," I said, stepping resignedly away from the fire. "Calming potions, specifically. Perhaps we should wait until he's finished."

"What's wrong with him?" said John in a hushed voice, tiptoeing into the kitchen. "Is he crazy?"

"No," I lied, "he's just having a bad week. If you could – "

"HA!!!" roared Voldemort, plunging into the kitchen and prodding a terrified John in the neck with his wand. "YOU AGAIN! I KNEW IT!!!"

"We're just talking," I said, at the end of my patience. "Go and finish your potion."

"Don't move!" Voldie barked at John, who was trying to draw his wand.

"_Expelliarmus!_" I said, and their wands flew into the air and broke the bulb in the kitchen light. I caught them on their way down – some practical use for Quidditch at last! – and Voldie and John started shouting at each other. Voldie advanced on me threateningly, clearly intent on getting his wand back; I drew mine on him and he stopped in astonishment.

I was waiting for him to say "Lower your wand immediately or die, meddling cretin," but in fact he said, "You can't Stun me, Harry. You wouldn't do that," in a very hurt voice. This made me feel guilty.

"No, I'm not going to," I assured him. "You're going to drink your potion, and then we're going to sit down and talk to John. Nicely."

"I can't," he said. "It's not ready. Wait here a minute while I take it off the Bunsen." He swished off into his laboratory and made some more clinking noises.

John sat down, subdued, and I sat and guarded him. His waistcoat really was rather awful; it was purple paisley.

After fidgeting next to me and sweating nervously for a while, he decided to make small talk. "How did you meet this Voldemort guy anyways?" he asked genially.

"He murdered my parents."

That spoilt the conversation a bit. We carried on waiting until Vol got back.

Understandably, there followed a very long and loud argument. I clung very tightly to Voldie's wand in order to prevent a large number of Unforgivables, but surprisingly, it didn't appear to be necessary; Voldie was only looking down his nose (nose... well... you know what I mean) at John and inflicting random insults. For a while I was quite puzzled by this; but finally I twigged from the relish with which Voldie was sneering that he was rather enjoying himself. He was preening at the unintentional flattery of being told that his twenty-eight-year-old skilz were impossible. This made me roll my eyes and poke him in the shoulder.

"Stop that, Vol," I said when they turned to face me in mild astonishment, having long since forgotten I was there. "You're just showing off. John, Lord Voldemort is a Dark Lord. He almost took over Britain, but our side kept stopping him – "

"Hah! – "

"_Shut_ it, Voldie. And of course he's powerful enough to have cast this stasis spell, so stop complaining and tell us what you want us to do about it."

John sat back, looking a bit dazed, then shouted, "I want you to take it off, of course!"

"Ha, yes," Voldie sneered before I could get a word in edgeways. "You want to be obliterated by ballistic missiles? Well, that can be arranged, of course..."

"What he means," I interjected, "is that he cast this spell so we could stop the nuclear war."

"I KNOW that," John shouted excitably, "but surely you didn't want to do it like _this? _Dear god, man, what will happen when you cancel the spell? The Muggle governments will throw fits!"

"Fuck the Muggle governments," said Voldemort, with which I was rather inclined to agree. "Since when do I care about their feelings?"

John groaned and clapped his hands to his face just the way Albert had several days earlier. This prompted me to shoehorn in, "Where have you been all this time?"

"What?" he said.

"He cast the spell a week ago, at least..."

"Everybody else turned up days ago," Voldie said at the same time.

"THERE ARE NO DAYS!" he shouted, banging his fists on the breakfast bar and spilling his coffee.

At this point, I'd had it. "WILL YOU BOTH STOP LOSING YOUR TEMPERS!" I bellowed deafeningly. While they both blinked at me I said courteously, "Thank you, John. I'm Harry Potter; I shout very loudly. Stop fighting and getting worked up – both of you – or I'll Bat-Bogey Hex the pair of you. No," I added menacingly, raising my wand, as Voldie started to object; "no arguments. Right. John: why haven't you been to the Chinese Ministry?"

"The _what?_"

"The Ministry of Magic in China," Voldie put in sardonically.

"Why?" John said blankly.

"You haven't been checking the Ministries for other witches and wizards?" I said.

"Uh..." he said, and stared at the table with an aura of guilty calculation so obvious he reminded me immediately of Mundungus Fletcher.

"Where _have _you been?" demanded Voldie.

"Uh..."

"Quiet, Vol," I said. "So. You haven't searched the Ministries. Where have you been searching?"

"Oh, here, there," he said vaguely, trying not to make eye contact. "All the usual places..."

I tried to figure out what he was talking about (or, rather, not talking about), and looked at Voldie, but he seemed to have no idea either.

"You appeared with a blue flash. Why d'you do that?"

"Mmm..."

"Were you following us at Fylingdales?" Voldie said suspiciously.

John stared at him in confusion. "What's that?"

"In Yorkshire."

"Huh?"

At this point, as you may have noticed, we were not so much getting nowhere as hurtling towards nowhere at nine thousand miles per hour. John, it appeared, was either exceptionally dense, a compulsive liar or both. Voldie was unable to stand it any longer, and said in Parseltongue, "Give me my wand and I'll Crucio some answers out of this bastard."

"Not bloody likely," I hissed firmly, moving away and raising my own wand. In English I said, "Er, John, there's a war on. It's quite important that you tell us the truth. What is that blue glow thing, and where have you been all this time?"

I expectedly him to get angry and start shouting again; instead he stared at the breakfast bar and mumbled, "Ain't really supposed to talk about that."

Voldie stared at him with horrible pertinacity and sudden said, "Where's Elke?"

"Who?" said John, startled.

Voldie sat back in dissatisfaction, folded his arms and said "You are the most singularly obstructive and gormless plank it has ever been my misfortune to meet." John glared at him. He glared back. They both looked at me speculatively as if wondering how long it would take to wrestle their wands off me, and I waved my own wand warningly.

"Potter," Voldie said in Parseltongue, "get torturing him. He obviously knows something, and this village idiot game really isn't funny."

"We're not torturing _anyone_," I said. "Besides, your élite'll really love you if you Crucio them."

"_Him_, élite! He's a moron!"

"We're not torturing him!" I said firmly as John sat and watched us in astonishment, unable to figure out what all the hissing was about. He suddenly reminded me very strongly of the Ministry bloke who had delivered the summons to Morfin Gaunt in the 1920s, only really stupid.

"Then put an Anti-Disapparation Jinx on him, at least. It's just _Non Disapparatus_. I don't want him getting away again before we can bore some answers out of him – "

"You can't do that!" I began, but at that moment John seized the opportunity to brain Voldemort with the teapot.


	15. Chapter 6b

**Chapter 6b: Hi John**

I expect the brained-with-a-teapot thing looks funny, the way I've put it, but in fact it was awful. There was a muffled _clunk _like two pots being banged together and Voldie collapsed awkwardly on the floor, showing no signs of being conscious or even alive.

"YOU WANKER!" I yelled. "_Non Disapparatus! Stupefy!_"

The Anti-Disapparation Jinx hit John square in the chest and trapped him in a little cage of white light. The Stunner, on the other hand, went straight through him, as he was already beginning to melt away into blue nothingness; and by the time I remembered the incantation for the Entrail-Expelling Curse he was gone altogether.

Right. Sod him. "_Mobilicorpus!_" I said, and dumped Voldie in his armchair. His head lolled back upsettingly. "Voldie," I begged, patting his face, "wake up, sweetie-pie. Come on, you miserable shit – _Rennervate_," I said, finally remembering the charm. "Yep, that's it, breathe... _Salutifera_... Voldie, you can't die _now_, after all the time I spent in peacetime trying to kill you. You have really bad timing. _Salutifera!_"

"The devil take you, Wormtail, it's _Consanesco _for substantial injuries," he snapped in a horrible voice that scraped on my nerves like quartz, and I stepped back, unnerved, and said, "Voldie?"

"Harry?" he said in surprise, opening his eyes. "Harry. No – there's no time, I have things to do. Harry, nuclear war's broken out," he said, flapping his hands distractedly and trying to stand up. "Can't sit around like this..."

"You need to maintain the temporal stasis spell," I said loudly and clearly, pushing him back into the chair. Sorry if that sounds callous, but I was much more concerned with remaining alive than with poor old Voldie's broken bonce. "You've already cast the temporal stasis spell. You need to keep it up."

"Maintain the... Yes, yes, it's working," he said absently, recovering quickly at the mention of his beloved science. "Temporal flow localised to... how very odd. _You _shouldn't be causing an incursion like that... sorry, who _are _you?"

"Harry Potter, and don't kill me. I'm helping you with things. Actually, I was _making your breakfast_... would you mind if I finished cooking it?"

"No," he said, sounding confused. "No, no, don't leave me alone."

"I won't, I'll be over there."

"No, no."

"_Locomotor armchair_," I said, losing my patience once again, and Voldie plus chair trundled over to the fireplace and sat there mumbling (not the chair) while the blessed breakfast finally materialised. After that there was ten minutes of intense communion with my stomach, interspersed with attempts to get Voldie's fork in his mouth.

"My head hurts," he said at last.

"Sorry," I mumbled. "I don't know any proper healing spells. I only know _Episkey _and – "

"That's not your fault," he snapped. "They don't teach Healing to children."

"I'm not a child."

"How long has the war been on for?" he asked.

"About a week."

"Is that all? I was thinking six months. Trying to work out how much time would have to pass before Harry Potter had to be on my side."

"Oh fuck off."

"I wouldn't have expected the light side to be pragmatic. I would have thought you'd say, 'Death by atom bomb is preferable to joining Voldemort'."

"The light side tries to _stop_ billions of people dying, and you need me around. You can't look after yourself. You can't even cook anything that isn't borscht."

"True, true," he said sadly, and he sat in his chair with unwonted quietness while I washed up and checked on his laboratory in case anything was blowing up, which it wasn't. When I came back he said calmly, "Do you know what electric shock therapy is, Harry?"

"They put electricity through your head," I said, eyeing him warily and hoping he didn't want me to administer a DIY job.

"Works by destroying your brain cells," he said. "That chamber-pot over the head might have done me some good, if you take the long view."

Well, if he was talking nonsense again he must be back to normal. "Listen, Voldie, I know it's a tall order and all that, but can you remember what we were actually supposed to do today?"

He stared at me. "Well, if _you_ can't remember, how the hell can I?"

Good point. I went back to his lab and peered around for sticky notes. I didn't find any, but I did find a Bunsen burner; on top of it was a flask full of black liquid.

I held the potion up to the light and peered at it. This, presumably, was Voldie's interrupted Calming Draught. I wondered if he should take it now. For that matter, I wondered if _I _should take it. I trundled back to the kitchen.

"Do you write things down at all?" I asked him. "If you had a diary or something you might have put appointments."

"I don't keep a diary," he said, staring absently into the motionless fire. "I might have made a note on a Push And Prattle."

"What's that when it's at home?"

"A pink round flat thing like a make-up compact. If you push it it'll talk to you."

"And I found your Calming Draught."

"Wasn't I calm?"

"Well, no."

"Not very surprising, really."

"But I'm not sure if it's finished."

"What colour is it?"

"Black."

"Mmm," he said. "The last ingredient's asphodel. So it depends on whether I've already added that or not."

"Shall I put some more in, just in case?"

"Please don't. Unless you would appreciate projectile diarrhoea?"

"Bizarrely, I wouldn't. Wait there."

I went to his bedroom and peered about for pink make-up compacts. However, I mostly found dust, chocolate bar wrappers and crumpled heaps of black robes. It came as a great shock to discover that he had more than one raggedy black dressing-gown, and I wondered how one went about getting the sinister rips and tears in precisely the same places on all of them, but I was relieved by the notion that he was changing his clothes occasionally. Still, I determined to tidy his room at the first possible opportunity. Wondering where on earth to start looking for the pink thing, I sat down on Voldemort's bed.

There was an almighty screech and some sort of... thing... erupted vigorously up my backside. Meditating with some abstracted part of my brain on how fortunate it was that I was wearing jeans now and not just my pants, I leapt up out of the way and spun round in time to see a bright blue snake rise up from the bedclothes and announce melodiously, "Fifteen minute reminder: meet Albert and fogies at French Ministry." It then shot back into the bed and vanished.

I poked through the bedclothes and found a thing like a pink make-up compact. Well. That was one question answered. I picked it up and hurried back through to Voldemort's laboratory. Grabbing the possibly incomplete Calming Draught off the Bunsen, I returned to the kitchen.

"Voldie, we've got to go," I informed him, dragging him away from a half-empty jar of pickled onions. "We've got to meet Albert Hottie and the Chinese witzies at the French Ministry of Magic. Here's your calming potion."

He looked at me as if I was totally crazy, which I suppose was really quite reasonable. "Chinese witzies in Grenoble? Why? And what's Albert Hottie doing there?"

"There's a nuclear war on," I explained patiently. "You spent yesterday teaching everyone how to defuse the warheads, except Albert I suppose already knew, and they'll probably want to report back and ask if they're doing it right. And I don't know why France. But we're supposed to be there in fifteen minutes."

He carried on staring at me. "Well, if I can't remember anything, or who they are, how can I lead a meeting?"

I thought. "Just talk about science," I instructed him. "You only need to tell them about nuclear physics, which is your favourite thing anyway. Or ask Albert for help."

"I'm not asking Albert for help, he'll be unbearable," he snapped immediately.

"Oh, don't be so childish, there's a war on," I said, feeling my temper start to escape once again. I remembered him banging his head on the bookcase and thought I might quite like to do that. Instead I found a Tupperware tin and started hurling apples and pasties into it.

When I'd amassed a reasonable amount of nosh, I suddenly saw John's wand, which I had left on the breakfast bar while I was succouring Voldie. I picked it up and put it in my back pocket. If he wanted it back, he could whistle for it.

000

My first impressions of Grenoble were decidedly mixed. The breathtaking snow-covered mountains visible through gaps in the cloud could not obscure the fact that the air tasted horrible. There were pretty churches and bridges visible, but the Ministry was in a grey box-like building that might once have been a bank; while Voldie waved his wand at the magical keypad I stared around in confusion and wondered why the French had put their central office in such a peculiar place.

"Did they put it here so it wouldn't get bombed?" I asked Voldie. "Why not Paris?"

"That wouldn't stop it getting bombed," he said. "Grenoble's got a load of important research centres. They put it here because the postwar Minister of Magic really liked skiing."

"I thought wizards didn't ski."

"He was Muggle-born."

"Oh."

"_Bienvenue à Grenoble," _shouted the keypad. "_Babyquidditch, c'est interdit_," and the door zoomed open. The Ministry interior (the interior ministry?) did not alleviate my confusion: we were in a bare cement cell that looked like a warehouse, although there were one or two frozen French witzies in garish robes there, so we were clearly in the right place. Voldemort navigated past them and up a dingy flight of stairs, then approached a tiny, globular, glass lift. This was already full of people.

Voldemort produced his wand. "Voldie," I said warningly.

He gave me a meaningful look, said "_Mobilicorpus," _and moved all the paralysed people out of the way.

"You're really getting quite nice," I said approvingly.

"'Wars always achieve the opposite of their avowed purpose,'" he recited absently. "'The war to make the world safe for democracy produced the worst dictatorships the world has ever seen. The war to end war produced the most fearful weapon of war the world has ever seen. And the war to stop communism has reduced all of us to living communistically'."

"Your war was to kill all the Muggleborns," I said, trundling into the lift and peering at the keypad, which only seemed to have one button.

"And now all we half-bloods are saving the world," he said. "Wonder what the avowed purpose of the nuclear war was? I don't think it actually had one. Mind you, maybe that's the point," and he pressed the button.

The lift door slammed shut. The entire roof of the building suddenly split in half down the middle and rose up into the air on two giant sets of hinges, and the lift shot into the sky like a missile. Once my insides had returned to their normal place, I managed to perceive that we were in a telephérique; the glass bubble was suspended above Grenoble by a glowing golden cord, which presumably was invisible to the Muggles.

I looked down through the glass between my feet and saw the Drac River wobbling slowly back and forth way below me as the Ministry roof returned to its original configuration. Looking up again very quickly, I decided that brooms were definitely the best way to travel, and that the British Ministry wasn't so bad after all; Voldemort, needless to say, felt a little more strongly than that, and collapsed into my arms with a loud moan, his hand over his eyes.

"It's all right, it's all right," I cooed, trying to hold on to my Tupperware tin while patting his back.

"Aaaargh," he soughed. "What if the cable breaks?"

"I'll just cast Wingardium Leviosa and make it fly back up again. Don't worry."

"Ohhh," he said. "I don't know how Muggles can stand to go skiing."

Our bubble slowly homed in on an elegant castly-type building (architecture is not my strong suit) sticking out of a bare cliff. The entrance hole for the bubble was a _very _snug fit, and Voldie unfortunately chose that moment to look up; he gave another agonised moan as we crept into the crag. I couldn't comfort him; I was pretty speechless myself.

The Ministry turned out to have a spectacularly posh reception with lots of velvet and gilding, but by that time the damage was done; Voldemort and I staggered into the toilets and I spent five minutes rubbing his back while he puked into the marble basin. It must have been Yevfimy and Svetlana who suggested meeting at the French Ministry, I decided. Only they could hate us this much.

000

The meeting was held in an opulent reception room with huge windows, which I suspect would have had a nice view of the snow-covered Alps if there hadn't been a huge cloud of radioactive smog in the way. Chinese and Scandinavian witzies were seated round a big mahogany table, yakking away to one another; some, I noted, were covered in engine oil, and looked distinctly knackered. One of the Chinese persons was snoozing away with his white beard resting on his chest, and looked distinctly like Professor Flitwick.

"Sit next to me, boy," Voldemort muttered, elbowing me in the ribs; he took his place at the head of the table, looking very haughty and majestic, and I scuttled in next to him and hid the Tupperware tin under the table. It occurred to me that he probably really needed his Calming Draught, so I discreetly fished it out of the tin and put it by Voldemort's elbow.

A Chinese bloke rushed up to us, coughed politely and indicated a big whiteboard behind Voldie's seat. "We remembered your made pictures yesterday," he said, "so we have made white screen for your use."

"That was a very good idea. Thank you," Voldie said smoothly, although presumably he had no idea what the guy was talking about. "Thank you, sir," Mr Whiteboard said genially, and he rushed off back to his seat. Voldie took a large gulp from his Calming Draught.

We'd been cutting our arrival a bit fine, of course, so within only a few minutes the room was bustling with oily witzies. I saw Albert and waved him over, but Voldie grabbed my wrist and hissed, "What are you doing?"

"I was just going to say hello," I lied.

"You were going to ask him for help!" Voldie fumed. "I tell you, I'm not asking him _anything!_" and I rolled my eyes and hoped the world wouldn't get blown up just to save his pride.

Eventually Miserable Svetlana seemed to think we'd been waiting long enough, because she banged the table loudly with a carafe and then sat there busily shuffling papers. All the standing persons obediently plonked their arses on chairs, and Voldie, seeing no way to procrastinate any further, tapped his wand on the table and said "Is everyone now ready to begin?"

Everyone was. Our two hours of purgatory began.

At first the proceedings were very formal. Voldemort cleverly shuffled responsibility onto everyone else by simply demanding that they report. They did so; since he basically understood everything they were telling him, this worked well. Soon the whiteboard was covered with a magical map of the Arctic Ocean, with little green ticks where a submarine had been successfully sabotaged, and big red question marks where the witzies weren't sure. The ticks outnumbered the question marks by a large amount, and I began to feel quite cheerful. Even Voldemort looked a bit more relaxed, and didn't bother drinking any more of his Calming Draught. I also began to feel extremely sleepy, which I suppose makes sense given the early-morning wakage; so I passed my time by looking at the ceiling, and counting bald patches, and amusing myself with the fact that if you turned "Grenoble" backwards you would get a town called "Elbow Nerg"; and finally I nodded off.

I had an odd dream at that point. I suppose that sentence is meaningless, because it's difficult to think what type of dream would be considered ordinary in a nuclear-war-prevented-by-Chinese-witzies context, but anyway, I had this dream. Practically nothing happened in it, but we were in this house and there was me and Dumbledore and my parents and Remus and Mr Weasley, and all the people that had died in _Threads;_ they were drinking some wine and Dumbledore was lounging on the sofa, explaining to my mum and dad that there was a war in 1997 and I was saving the world with Voldemort. My mum and dad were nodding and smiling approvingly and I wanted to get back into the '80s to tell them something, to tell them I loved them or not to worry about nuclear war or to worry about it more, because perhaps if people had protested more in the past it might not have happened in the present; but I seemed to be looking through a pane of glass, because I could see them smiling at me, but I couldn't say anything. Then the last image of the dream was Cedric Diggory smiling at me too, just sitting there, and then I woke up and it all faded away.

I had a terrible crick in my neck and my shoulder was covered in drool. I rubbed my neck while thinking about the dream.

"What! _How _could you confuse a whale with a submarine? Do you have any idea how big those things are?!"

"It was, ah, vot is it?... blue vhale."

"They're only thirty metres long, you idiot!"

"But ve have seen small submarine..."

"That's because it _wasn't nuclear!_" Volide seethed, taking another gulp from his Calming Draught, which was now half-empty. I patted his arm absently.

I could see why the _Threads _lot were happy: because they hadn't died, because the war hadn't happened in 1984 and now it wouldn't happen in 1997 either. Remus and Arthur, fair enough; they wouldn't want to pop their clogs, and Arthur had a million offspring to worry about. As for Dumbledore, he would probably think it was OK if he died so long as we saved the world afterwards. (Hell, for all I knew, he'd ordered Snape to kill him for that very purpose. He was bonkers enough, I supposed.)

My mum and dad, though... they _had _died. They hadn't even made it to 1984; and that seemed such a _long _time ago, even though it was only thirteen years, such a dark labyrinth of time in which to be lost.

"_What? _But _why _did you stop them?"

"Because that vos _our _submarine. It vos a Russian submarine, also, we had got there first – "

"They did not get first, we had discover two hours earlier and bookmark – "

"Aha. Ahahahaha! Are you all completely mad? Ha! There is _a nuclear war on! _Fighting over a submarine! Ha-ha-ha!"

My dad never even knew what nuclear war was, I realised. Purebloods didn't know or care about silly Muggle inventions. This made me feel strangely alone. I thought of how impressed everyone had seemed with me, in the dream, that is; the responsibility seemed rather awesome, and then I remember that there were theoretically five billion people depending on us, not just a dozen wizards or however many people there were in Sheffield.

We could save five billion Muggles, even, bizarrely, people from the past; we could alleviate the fears of everyone who thought 1997 would be a wasteland, but we couldn't save my mum and dad. As for Cedric, I had no idea what he was doing there.

At that point, "This is Harry," Voldemort shouted, hurling his arm around my shoulder. "He's a good boy really, aren't you, Harry? I thought he wash just one of Dumbledore'sh minidons – myrmi – Merm – A good boy. I'm NOT some kind ugh predator," he ranted, and I realised, possibly rather late in the day, that something had gone awry. The something happened to be a chemist's flask that was now almost entirely empty of black fluid.

"I've always hated escargots," he added for good measure.

"Er – sorry," I apologised to the tableful of silently gaping witzies. "He, er, I made him a Calming Draught. I think I forgot to put in the asphodel." I put my arms around Voldie and smoothly detached the flask from his hand before he could get himself any more rat-arsed.

He didn't like that. He staggered to his feet and shook me off angrily. "That idiot from America," he seethed. "He shought Harry was a Muggle. How shtupid. What you don't realise," he lectured the boggle-eyed fogies, "is that – er – And another thing, the blue glow wasn't a blue glow at all! So our psychobological universe is, well..." and then, perhaps seeking inspiration, he turned round and looked out of the window.

There was a ghastly scream. Everyone jumped, and it took me a moment to figure out that the strange noise had emanated from Voldemort, who was pointing out through the window in a frenzy of horror.

"Look, look," he shrieked, "the bomb! It's coming, there it is," and we all leapt to our feet and stared out at, well, _the telephérique_, which Voldie in his drunken paranoia had clearly mistaken for a missile; and everyone except me burst out laughing as he frantically legged it across the boardroom and into the foyer.

I, needless to say, had many choice words I would have liked to say to the ancients; but all those words were in English, and besides, I had more important things to do. Hurling a few "fuck"s over my shoulder, I sprinted after Voldemort, who was moving remarkably quickly; fortunately he was leaving a trail of urine for me to follow, but the French Ministry turned out to have an awful lot of sweeping mahogany staircases for panicking Dark Lords to run up and down. Exhausted and impatient, I finally cast a Trip Jinx that made him fall up the stairs and bruise his elbows.

"Now, stop that," I said firmly, gathering him up in my arms and holding tightly on to his robe. "Voldie, what's the spell that sobers people up?... _Rennervate. Consanesco,_" I said, hoping the effects of the potion were an illness that could be cured. "Stop being stupid and just calm down. You've had a bang on the head, and you're drunk."

He blinked a couple of times and said, "Yes, I am, aren't I?"

"So you know that," I said, vastly relieved.

"Ahh..." he said, and opened and closed his mouth a few times, apparently speechless.

"Oh, Voldie," I said, "we just don't ever seem to..." but I couldn't think what to say either. I cleaned him up briskly, and walked up and down the Ministry stairs erasing his little trails of wee; and then I put my arms around him and ordered him to Apparate us back to Wales, because quite frankly, I cared about as much for those senile old idiots back in the conference room as I did for stupid John.


	16. Chapter 6c

**Chapter 6c: Hi John**

Voldemort snoozed for a very long time; well, only about four hours, I suppose, but believe me, by his standards that was a lot. Fair enough; he must have the worst hangover of all time. When I'd said we should get pissed and wear women's underwear, that hadn't been what I meant. I passed the time by washing his robes (which, in a stream, turned out to be rather more difficult than I had expected) and thinking up imaginative new tortures to use on John when he came back for his wand.

Sure enough, after a couple of hours he shuffled dolefully across the garden, with his face as long as his general chubbiness would allow. I was sitting under the washing line to allow Voldie's robes to dry properly, reading some more of _Unclear Physics; _when I saw the first flash of paisley I sat up, marked my place with a leaf, and lay back to glare at John as he dithered uncertainly towards me.

"Uh, I'm sorry I hit your friend with the teapot," he began forlornly.

"Not as sorry as I am," I snarled. "Don't you know you could have disrupted the stasis spell and started the war again?"

"Uh, well, I do now," he grimaced, "but I kind of didn't realise that then... he ain't gonna kill me, is he?"

"No. He's asleep. Which is lucky for you... I've got half a mind to do it myself," I muttered.

"Hey, now!" he protested. "You don't realise how creepy it was, you're talking to a guy and a snake-man, and they start talking some snake-language, and he gets a look on his face like he's going to BITE like a rattler..."

"He doesn't bite people," I said in annoyance. "He's very fastidious."

"Right," John said dubiously. "Well, anyways, sorry, and uh, if I could maybe have my wand back..."

"Yes, you can," I said, and then, as he brightened, "once you've answered all my questions. And don't think you can mug me for it," I added, since he was looking at me with a transparently calculating expression, "because I hid it. So. What's that blue glow?"

Panic struggled with wand-hunger in his face for several seconds before he said, "I can't tell you _that!_"

"Why not?" I demanded.

"Uh... because I'll be punished?" he said in a cautious voice, looking up at the sky, and then added in a much happier voice, "Guess that was OK."

"What?!" I said.

"I wasn't punished! Nuthn happened when I told you that! I don't think I could tell you much more, though."

I was tempted to point out that he _hadn't _told me _anything_, but restrained myself. "So, you've taken an Unbreakable Vow, or something?"

"Oh, it ain't that simple," he said at once. "Break an Unbreakable Vow, poof, you die. The Blue Stair, it's kind of temperamental – aaargh!" he said as a giant azure fist coalesced out of nowhere, punched him in the face, and faded out of existence.

"_Salutifera_," I said blankly as John sat down on the grass, his eyes watering and his hand on his nose. "Or possibly _consanesco_... temperamental. Yeah, I see what you mean. What did you call it again? The Blue Tear?"

John glared up at me through his tears; my healing spells had not, it appeared, been so successful that he wanted to risk saying the name again.

"This is worse than saying Voldemort," I muttered. "The Blue Stair. Right?"

John stared around in horrified anticipation. Nothing happened.

"_I _can say it," I said triumphantly. "So is it the Blue Stair that you walk up, or a Stare that, you know, looks at you?"

He glared at me again and refused to answer.

"Fine. Is it the first one? Stair that you walk up?"

He looked around carefully, then nodded. For a long moment, nothing happened, and he began to smile broadly just as a large blue welly appeared and booted him up the bum. "AAGH!" he wailed. "I didn't even say nuthn! I didn't say a word!"

"The Blue Stair," I said, satisfied. "So it's like the Floo Network, except it's an invisible blue staircase you walk up and down? And it's alive?"

John contemplated me miserably, his head on one side. I sighed and said, "Stay quiet if the answer's yes."

He stayed very quiet. Nothing happened this time, and there was much rejoicing; from him, anyway, while I stood and contemplated all that this implied.

"So where does the Blue Stair _go _to?" I demanded. "Where do you live?"

A pleading look was the only response. I decided it didn't matter anyway.

"Do you hang around with other witches and wizards?" I asked.

"Sure," he said, bemused. "Not really anyone else to talk to."

"With ordinary witzies?" I demanded. "On Earth? Because it took you a hell of a long time to figure out that time had stopped."

"Uh... well," he mumbled. "Possibly not on Earth as such..." and a large blue watering can appeared above his head and gave him a good soaking. He howled a bit more, and I made sympathetic noises, which would possibly have been a bit more sincere if I hadn't been remembering the teapot.

"So that's why you didn't turn up at the Chinese Ministry," I decided. "You don't know any ordinary people. You hang around with that élite."

"What élite?" he said, bemused. "I didn't know we were an élite. Just... don't want to be bothered by everyone else."

This was almost exactly how Hagrid had explained the witzyworld to me when I was eleven. I had a sudden vision of a second, more powerful witzyworld hidden inside the first; but, looking at John wringing out his jacket on the lawn, I had to conclude that they couldn't be that powerful if they were all like him. He reminded me a bit of Hagrid, now I came to think about it, except considerably less endearing.

"But I assume your lot have figured out there's a war on now."

"Uh, well," he said, fidgeting.

"Well, _you _have," I pointed out.

"Yes, but, uh, I don't think anyone else is especially interested," he mumbled, and was promptly smacked over the head by a blue tennis racket.

"Not _interested,_" I said, stunned.

"Owww," John moaned, massaging his head, but I was not in the least sympathetic. Poking him in the shoulder, I demanded, "How can anyone not be arsed about a fucking nuclear war?"

After a pause, he said, "I don't know if it would affect us up there... or some of them may not have realised."

While he ran all over the garden, yelping, as he was punished, I digested this. He inhabited, it appeared, a whole new dimension, not just a different society; when you went up (or down) the Blue Stair you were safe from thermonuclear war on Earth. This, frankly, seemed bad. It seemed only a matter of time before some mental pureblood (or Voldemort, in fact) started a war and then retreated off up the Stair to watch smugly as all the Muggles were destroyed. Perhaps that was even what had happened.

Well. I couldn't make a decision based on current information. I waited for John to stop hooting and said, "Why can't you tell me about the Blue Stair?"

"I told you–!"

"No. I mean, how do I join the club? If me and Voldemort join the élite, you'll be able to tell us all this stuff without being hit over the head, won't you?"

He gaped at me and said "Well – you'd have to go up it."

"Is that difficult?"

"Kinda," he said, subdued. "You don't just walk up it, bud. It decides whether it wants you to go up or not."

There was no punishment. The Stair clearly approved of this communication.

"What happens?" I asked.

"All kind of whacked-out stuff. Just gotta keep on going."

It didn't sound terribly difficult to me. "How d'you start? I mean, how d'you get to it in the first place so that you can go up it?"

Dubious again. "Uh, I'm not sure I can tell you. I mean, I know where the nearest point on the shoreline is, and I could show you how I swam down to it, but it probably wouldn't let me without a damn good reason."

For some reason, this had the same effect on me as a bent paperclip poked into my fillings. "A good reason. A good bloody reason? SUCH AS A FUCKING NUCLEAR WAR, FOR EXAMPLE? Do you have any idea how long Voldemort's spent getting ready for this thing? And that if it happened it would wipe out the WHOLE BIOSPHERE – not just the human race and stuff – EVERYTHING WOULD BE DEAD? Voldemort has been going BONKERS sorting this out and you come swanning in a week later and say we DON'T HAVE A GOOD FUCKING REASON?! – "

Perhaps unsurprisingly, John grew fed up of this tirade and decided to take action. He melted away with the usual blue glow, leaving me thinking "What a silly man, he forgot his wand again," regrettably unaware that he had reappeared directly behind me. The next thing I knew he had jumped onto my back and wrestled me to the ground; taken by surprise, and entirely unaccustomed to hand-to-hand combat, I was swiftly annihilated, and John purloined my wand and used a Summoning Charm to bring his own soaring out of the pigsties. Clearly I should have found a better place to hide it, I thought absently as he vanished in bewanded triumph. Still, unlike Li Hsu-Deng, he did at least leave mine behind. I picked it up and used it to scratch my head while I thought.

Well. The teapot escapologist had slipped through my fingers once again. I did know a bit more than I'd known before, but I doubted Voldemort would be very happy. Still, at least I'd prevented his killing John horribly.

His robes were nicely dry now. I took them inside before they got cardboardy and started cooking his tea.

000

At length, poor Voldie woke up and came tottering quietly out of his bedroom in his borrowed dressing-gown. He was surprised and gratified when I gave him a clean robe; evidently he'd assumed I'd just cut them all up to use as dishcloths or something. Trauma, concussion and intoxication had greatly improved his personality, I decided. Perhaps we should do this every day. Or, y'know, not.

He then Apparated briefly to India and came back with Lakshmi Bhattacharya, who briefed him endlessly on the current submarine situation while I gastronomised in the background. As it turned out, things were going well; his science-related explanations had been so clear that nobody had blown themself up so far, and if they kept arguing over who got to do the Russian subs and who the American ones, well, that was their lookout.

"You are better after your problems this afternoon, sir?" Lakshmi said in her usual distant tone. "I am informed that you were attacked by Wrackspurts."

Voldemort gave me a sidelong look. "Harry messed up my Calming Potion," he informed her grimly. "I'm punishing him by making him cook dinner. He hates cooking," he confided.

I did my best to look woebegone. Lakshmi nodded approvingly.

We asked her to stay for tea. She declined, and I gave her the doggy-bag I had prepared for precisely this eventuality, which contained pies and a cheesecake to take back to her beloved Ministry. She stared at these doubtfully as if thinking "mmm, blandest thing on the menu", but did accept them; we were making progress on the elf/food thing.

Then she departed and we were left in blissful solitude to eat our tea. I couldn't understand why I was so happy; then I realised, to my great embarrassment, that I had been looking forward to this restful Voldetime all day. Over the last few days we had established a routine of nattering in the "evenings" after getting up to our bonkers shenanigans during the "day", and it was an intense relief to discover that the customary chinwag, or in this case companionable silence, still existed. I wasn't too sure about Voldie's mental state, though, so I spent the second half of the meal staring speculatively at his frosty pow (and, incidentally, comparing him to a beansprout).

Without looking up, he suddenly said, "Wibblywibblywibblywib, wibblywib, wibblywibblywib."

"What?!" I said.

"I wanted to disturb you," he said mildly. "Did it work?"

"You silly sod," I fumed. "Here I am thinking you're going bananas and you're being an idiot. Eat your tea."

"I've finished now," he said, demolishing the remainder of his stir-fry in two decisive bites. "I give you permission to ask about my mental health."

"Fine. Are you mad?"

"Mad as always."

"Drunk? Head bashed in? All that stuff?"

He snickered. "Mostly recovered."

"Good," I said, feeling shattered. "I expect I had loads of things I wanted to say to you, but it's so long since you were halfway sane I can't remember what they were. Anyway, Bad Waistcoat John came back."

Voldie's reaction was just as one would have expected: "WHAT! He came back? Why didn't you wake me up? I'd have strung him up with his own intestines," etc. Eventually I managed to persuade him that the torture scenario might have been a bad idea, since we would then never have got any information out of the tubby one; and Voldie finally registered that I had heard John say something useful, which struck him quite speechless.

I took advantage of the silence: "He's part of the élite, except they don't call themselves the élite, and they live at the top of a thing called the Blue Stair. It's blue. And it doesn't like being talked about, and whenever he dropped hints about it, it hit him."

"Good," Voldie said absently.

"You can join the élite, kind of, by walking up the Stair and seeing whether it lets you, but I don't know where the entrance is. He knows, but he got away before I could make him say."

"Have you still got his wand?"

"No," I said, and before he could call me a dimwitted waste of DNA I told him how John had appeared behind me and sat on me head. This called forth mutters and snarls, which, pleasingly, appeared to be aimed at John rather than me; I wasn't bothered, because this gave me time to think about the invulnerability of the Blue Landing and how best to approach it.

During a hiatus in the swearing I said, "And they haven't done anything about the war because they haven't noticed it's going on, or possibly because they don't care."

"_Christ!_" Voldie said. "We're well out of _that_, then."

My heart lifting, I said, "So you're not going to sneak off into Blue Stair land and leave the rest of us to get fried?"

He gave me a glare, which changed into a look of alarm, and then said, "You're not joking? You actually thought I would do that?"

"Well, I don't know," I said, filled with inexplicable happiness. "We don't really know much about this blue place. It might be dead boring or full of paisley waistcoats or something."

"It sounds horrible," he said. "I would be all on my own."

I wondered when he'd started desiring human company. He'd never given the slightest hint that this might be the case. "I don't think you'd want to go there anyway," I said. "The entrance is under the sea."

There was a silence. Voldie stared at me for a moment as his eyeballs made sustained efforts to escape his skull. Then he screamed like a bandsaw, "UNDER THE SEA!"

"It's all right – "

"UNDER THE SEA!"

"Calm down, I'm not suggesting we – "

"I MIGHT DROWN! I MIGHT GET LOST DOWN THERE IN THE DARK! UNDER THE WATER! UNDERWATER! NO! NO! NO!"

I decided to stay quiet and just to sit there rubbing his back until he stopped hyperventilating and calmed down. I also made a mental note never to mention the sea again, and possibly never even to suggest he take a bath; any amount of BO would be preferable to all that screeching. "We don't have to do anything about it, Vol. We're doing all right without them. The crumblies haven't even blown themselves up yet."

"True," he wheezed faintly. "But you'd better wash your mouth out. If you say we're doing all right, something'll go wrong."

"Oh, for god's sake," I said, stumping off to the sink and leaving him to rub his own back.

"And you see, blue _was _your lucky colour," he realised amid the waterworks. "We know where the blue glow comes from now. Although it isn't very dramatic. So that horoscope this morning was right."

"You're very superstitious," I observed in between gargles, and turned round to find myself facing a solid-oxygen glare as he said, "Was that a dig?"

A dig? "What?"

He calmed down. "So it wasn't. Superstition is a specific charge levelled against half-bloods. Didn't you know that? Humphrey Rice-Doogles, who was more pureblooded than the purebloods, used to sneer that half-bloods and Muggle-borns were addicted to superstition, which was 'neither good magic nor science'."

I found this bizarre. "Like you can talk about that. You _hate _Muggle-borns."

"But it's true. I am superstitious!... The English Muggles levelled it against the Irish as well, actually. Supposed to be proof that they were irrational, which doesn't make any sense because every culture has dozens of little rituals that they perform without thinking. Personally I feel that the concept of superstition is one of the ways the dominant culture mocks a minority for its entirely justifiable anxieties. Tsitsi Dangarembga mentioned it, talking about colonial Zimbabwe: 'The condition of the native is a nervous condition'."

I understood this lecture surprisingly well, and managed to distil the possibly rather crude summary that he was blaming his mental problems on his shit life. Distractedly juggling three oranges, I said, "But not everyone with a shit life has mental problems."

"In fact they do," he said calmly. "Lots of them do, but nobody pays them any attention. Why d'you think I never got diagnosed? People don't care about kids. They only take notice of your mental state if you start breaking things and killing people, or shouting very loudly, in your case."

"Are you saying that's why you killed rabbits?" I said in disbelief.

"What – consciously, to get medical treatment? Of course not. But... I suppose that did play into it to some... Harry, I don't know. It was a long time ago, and I was only seven."

"And now," I said absently, mimicking the way he had sneered at John only a few hours earlier, "you are sixty-nine." He had gone barmy, I calculated, sixty-two years ago. Ten years before the atom bomb, forty-five years before I was born. It did indeed seem a bit much to ask him to remember all the details.

"I am! And I did cast that spell when I was twenty-eight, whatever he thinks... I hate him, I hate him. Oh, and I haven't forgiven him for saying 'What are you?'," Voldie added vindictively, getting himself a chocolate bar and sitting in his favourite armchair. "What the fuck does he think I am? A cabbage?"

"Well, you don't look like a human, do you?" I said absently. "Centaurs look more human than you do. If they were stood behind a wall."

Voldemort found this unaccountably amusing.

"You've got red eyes," I continued, ignoring him, "you're bald all over – erm, possibly – and your skin's way too white."

"A good thing too," he said dispassionately, delicately snapping his chocolate into perfect little pieces. "The severity of thermal radiation burns is in direct proportion to the darkness of one's skin."

"What, you mean if you're dark you burn more?"

"Yes."

"Tight for Black people."

"Why d'you think South Africa started its nuclear programme?"

"Really?" I whispered, horrified.

Voldemort rolled his eyes. "No, dear."

I managed not to kick him.

"You look like those little aliens that come out of the ship that goes Dah Dah Dah Dah Dah," I noted.

"Wibblywib. Wibblywibblywib."

"Do you think the same way as other people?" I demanded. "Do you see the same things as us? Do you _smell_ the same?"

He bared the fangs, put his chocolate down on the little table and said, "Smell me."

"That's not what I meant," I mumbled, but he was tipping his head over and pointing at the crook of his neck, so I leant over his armchair and put my face close to him. He didn't stink at all. There was no fragrance either, just a clean dusty smell like old books or a cat's fur. I sniffed it for a while, and by then I'd inhaled so much that I became light-headed and had to sit down. He laughed at me.

"Well," I said, "you _don't _smell the same."

"I'm not a human," he said. "I'm not a snake. I am something else altogether."

"Oh, give up. I wash your dressing gowns. You don't have to boast to _me_."

"I know," he said.

"I need a bath now myself," I said absently, wandering towards the bathroom to check for clean towels.

"Harry," came Voldie's voice from behind me, making me stop short.

"M-hm?" I said, poking my head round the kitchen door.

Voldie was holding the foil from the chocolate wrapper in his claws, carefully perforating it into a little silver colander. He looked at me with a faintly guilty expression and said, "Can I sleep in your bed tonight?"

"While I'm in it?" I asked.

"Well, yes. That's pretty much the _point_."

I thought about it. "Yes," I shrugged, and went off to have my bath.

This was a great luxury. I savoured the extravagance of being warm and comfortable, ensconced in bubbles and redolent of fairly-traded coconut. It seemed like months since I had last had the opportunity to relax this much. Actually, I realised, it had probably been years; as long as Voldemort needed me and the stasis spell held, I was safer than I'd ever been, which seemed a bit ironic. And god almighty, _how _he needed me! If that stasis spell depended on his mental state, I'd better get him in my bed as fast as possible and read him a bedtime story if he wanted one.

No, I decided, viewed in its proper perspective, doubling up with Voldemort wasn't much of a problem. Frankly, given everything that had happened to the poor old sod today, it seemed like the least I could do.


	17. I Always Knew The Sky Was A Prison

**How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Lord Voldemort**

**Chapter 7: I Always Knew The Sky Was A Prison**

In June 1997 there were about a dozen nuclear bases in Europe. I know, because the next day Voldie and I visited each of them in turn to disarm their missiles. Voldemort ticked off each one on a little shopping list: Volkel, Kleine Brogel, Ghedi, Aviano, Istres, Toulon, Brest... AHAHAHAHA!!!! Ahem. Sorry. Indeed, Voldie also became fed up of my cackling at Brest, and conjured up a large hand that slapped me around the head. At that point even I had to admit that I could be rather immature.

The constant Apparition was awful, and caused gurgling nausea on my part; on the plus side, Voldemort was coping well with the missiles and hadn't screamed and wet himself once, so I dared to speculate that his phobias had gone away. (As you can no doubt imagine, I was wrong.) Albert turned up when we were at Brest and edged very cautiously towards Voldie, obviously expecting to be greeted with a Cruciatus; Voldie just barked "Oh, stop being so ridiculous, Albert. We're not playing hide and seek," and they had an extremely long argument. Then Albert gave him the latest progress report on the submarines, which apparently was good, because when Voldie finally Apparated us off to Spangdahlem he was whistling the theme tune from _Muffin The Mule_.

So at this point we arrived in Spangdahlem. Spangdahlem, dear cohorts, is in Germany. This may not initially seem of much relevance, but I was soon to find out that it was; specifically, as soon as we had Apparated to the airfield, Voldie stared upwards as if having a vision and said, "What. The. Fuck."

I was still out of sorts due to the Apparition. Sitting down hard on the runway, I looked giddily up at the sky. The grey clouds above were occluded by a sparkling, shifting sheen of rainbow magic, like a giant soap bubble.

I wrenched my brains around until I developed the vague ability to give a damn. "Cool," I managed to burble. "What is it?"

"Well, if I knew that I'd..." he stopped and spluttered, apparently unable to think what he would do. "_What exactly is this and who put it there?_"

"D'you think it's appeared in Wales as well?" I pondered, mildly worried. A permanently day-glo universe would be a bad thing, I decided, because it would exacerbate my headache. "Or is it just here?"

"Good point," Voldie said absently, and he Apparated us back to Wales before I could say "Nooooo". The sky there was still completely blue; or, at least, so I gather from what la Morte told me later, because at the time I was too busy telling him how much I hated him.

"You have no business to fucking Apparate me every two seconds, you piece of shit. I – Christ," I said, puking.

"Yes, yes," Voldie said absently, patting my back while I heaved into the sink. "Well, you'll be happy to know I want you to get out your horrible broomstick and fly to Germany, because I need to know how far that shield extends. What I don't understand is," he continued, ignoring my plight as I tried to snort stomach acid out of my nose, "how come we haven't heard about it before now? Did those Finns not go to Estonia before?"

"They were pissed as farts. They probably saw pink elephants as well," I said shortly, glugging some water and spitting it into the bucket. Voldie Vanished the vomit and said "Well, true. But why didn't we notice it when we were flying after the Eagles? I'm sure we went over Germany, and it looks pretty large."

"There was too much cloud cover and you had your eyes shut the whole time," I purred with affectionate contempt.

"You still think I was being a ninny," he said. "Ah, well. Maybe one day you'll learn."

"What, learn to be frightened of flying?" I snorted, and regretted it as my nose caught fire again. "No thanks."

"Learn that the only appropriate way of seeing some things is with, to put it bluntly, horror. You don't comprehend these things the way I do. Or even how most others do. How d'you see the world, boy? Flattened, monochrome, inconsequential?"

"What?" I said, discombobulated.

"How d'you see the world? You're depressed, aren't you? It's one big sea of grey."

"Of course it isn't!" I said indignantly.

"Yes, it is. You're off your trolley. Didn't you know that?"

"NO! Because I'm NOT!"

"A lot you know. You just don't understand that the way you think is unusual. Have you ever seen inside someone else's mind, boy? It's a shock. Perhaps the greatest shock you'll ever have. Their lives are like pastel watercolours. You take a look, and you realise you have nothing in common with them and never will."

He sounded, as I later realised, rather vainglorious about this; proud. I certainly wasn't proud. I was busy digesting this and thinking that, if true, it confirmed all my worst fears. I really was a freak.

"For your sake, boy, I hope you never defeat me," he said, now sounding faintly mocking. "Your obsession with destroying me is all that keeps you going. If you bump me off I predict a nervous breakdown, a series of unsuccessful relationships and several failed careers in something ridiculous like professional Quidditch, culminating in death by alcohol poisoning by the age of fifty."

"You needn't sound so pleased about it," I said absently, wondering if what he said was true. To be quite honest I had a tremendous certainty that it was. Not the relationships and alcoholism bit, but the sense that, when Voldemort was dead, there would be nothing left. In a sense, the nuclear bomb quest was a microcosm of my life. If we succeeded in defusing all the bombs (and don't say it out loud, because you'll only tempt fate and Voldemort will wash your head again), it seemed that going back to a normal life would be unthinkable. As he said, one big sea of grey.

Like the cloud cover over Germany. "We shouldn't be sat around doing fuck all anyway. You wait here and I'll get my broomstick," I said, and set about fixing the holes in Ron's Quidditch gloves.

000

The rainbow bubbly thing initiated, abruptly and improbably, bang on the German border. Or within a few dozen feet of it, I suppose, anyway, since Voldie was using the Rhine as a reference point, and it was considerably larger, I thought, than any river had a right to be; and also sprawling and grey and full of rain, so the sight of that gaudy rainbow, a sparkling, shifting curtain neatly drawn across the river, was surreal in the extreme. Voldemort banged on my shoulder to tell me to stop, and I sat on my broom and stared down at the long skinny boat things that sat forever unmoving in the water, wondering why it was just Germany that had a magical umbrella.

"Stay where you are and _don't _fly through it," Voldie ordered, taking his gloves off and producing his wand; "I don't know what its function is yet." So he drew dozens of complicated magical patterns in mid-air, and I sat around and watched the colours sparkling on the umbrella because there wasn't much else to do. A rainbow, I thought, in a sea of grey; and wondered why that sounded familiar.

At last he said, "It's a protective shield. It's extremely weak."

"Can we go through it?"

"I'm not actually sure. There's no need to, anyway. We'll just Apparate to the other side."

"Aw, _no!_"

"It's not very far!"

"I hate you."

We followed the Rhine south-east under the glittering umbrella, passing houses with shutters and antique boats and a big chimney with an enormous amount of pollution pouring out of it; below, the water fluctuated occasionally between grey and milky-tea, then an intriguing sort of green colour. Eventually Voldie signalled for me to turn east, and we flew into Essen; as we entered its impressively green and woolly environs, the umbrella grew fainter, fainter, and disappeared. Voldemort whacked me on the shoulder again and we stopped.

"Ha," he said, taking off his gloves again and firing spells. "Well, that explains a lot."

"It does?" I said blankly, and he tapped my head with his horrid hard knuckles and said "Harry, dear. Initiate brain. I date this shield to somewhere over a hundred years old, and the Allies bombed Germany to bits rather more recently than that."

"Maybe they bombed their way through the shield," I suggested, rubbing my head.

"Pardon?! Magically? – oh. The blast might have... Ah, yes, yes, possibly, but it's still rather intriguing. Who would bother making a bombproof shield at a time when there weren't any aeroplanes, and how has it ingeniously managed to erect itself as soon as we reach Defcon 1? That's some very good forward planning if it was created in 1890 or whenever."

"Well – yeah – great."

He found that incredibly amusing, and gave a long series of titters and snickers as we flew and Disapparated around checking the shield's boundaries. We flew for several hundred miles; this increased my knowledge of Europe so greatly that I thought I would have to get a new head to keep it all in. This wasn't really how I'd pictured seeing the world, but hey, a journey is a journey.

The shield extended eastwards, most improbably, all the way to Lithuania, which seemed to make Voldie happy since it apparently confirmed that the shield had been created for Prussia.

"Prussia! _Prussia! _Think of that," Voldie kept saying, and other inane things of this type, all the time we were flying over Germany. "A secret umbrella shield for Prussia in the 1890s – or, at any rate, I've never heard of it – although it doesn't seem to have weathered the Second World War very well, and here it is, popping itself back up for World War III!... I really think this must be the mysterious Elke again. I can't think of anyone this powerful among all those nincompoops at the German Ministry... blah." He went on and on, but I decided I didn't really mind, because he didn't seem to have noticed that we were flying home instead of Apparating. I silently blessed the soul of Saint Elke.

"Well," he said as we climbed out of our Quidditch gear in the garden, "I see we never did get round to defusing the bombs in Germany, but I'm sure the others won't mind. You think?"

"Er," I said.

"Thought not," he beamed, leaping round in little circles and slapping Ron's Keeper's gloves together. "Right, so we'll go and tell Albert and all the others not to fly through the shield, since the resulting Grapsnackle explosion might damage it, and we'll ask them if they know anything about it, too, although I don't think they will. Then we'd better get down to the German Ministry and – yes?" he said, finally noticing that I'd been attempting to tell him something for most of this monologue.

"We?" I said. "_We?"_

"Well? You're coming, aren't you?"

"No!"

"Oh, god..." he gurned, rolling his eyes.

"I need to lie down after all that fucking Apparition!" I grumbled, bundling up all the Quidditch gear and hefting it towards the kitchen.

"Wimp. You could lie down at the Ministry."

"Not if it's anything like the British one," I muttered, dropping all the Quidditch gear on the floor and getting myself a glass of water. Voldemort conjured up a sack and started frenziedly flinging chocolate and oranges into it.

"What are you doing?" I spluttered, getting stomach acid up my nose again just when I thought I'd ejected it all. "_Snotaculate_," he shouted, and it all came snorting out again and hit the windowpane. "I'm packing you some food, of course. Then I'll cast a Sleeping Spell and Apparate you to the Ministry. It shouldn't bother you too much if you're asleep – "

"Then what's the point in taking me?!"

"Lazy bastard," he fumed, "you won't even go to sleep for me! You _know _I'm scared of being alone – "

"But if I'm zonked out, you _will _be alone!"

"_Dorme!_" he said peremptorily, and I knew no more. I hope he caught me before I hit the floor.


	18. Chapter 7b

**Chapter 7b: ****I Always Knew The Sky Was A Prison**

I came to my senses, insofar as I have any, in a strange, echoing gloom. For a moment I thought I was in the Chamber of Secrets. I was staring up between grimy limestone buttresses that rose to an astonishing height before culminating in a sort of nave with stained-glass windows; I thought I was in a cathedral, and sat up in complete bewilderment, only to receive a nasty shock as I found Voldemort's grumpy moonstone face glaring down at me. This did nothing to negate the Chamber of Secrets effect. I jumped and he looked offended.

"What's the matter? I haven't done anything," he said indignantly. "There aren't even any Muggles here to kill. I just thought I'd wake you up because this place is so creepy."

"That's _why I jumped_," I pointed out. This was a slight lie, but I didn't want to hurt his feelings. I looked down and found I was lying on a sleeping bag, so at least he'd made a bit of effort. I stood up and looked around; he snapped his fingers and the sleeping bag vanished.

The quick skeg didn't help. The German Ministry, if this was it, was indisputably a giant stone thing in severe need of a clean. It was also very cold, and someone, it seemed, had had the bright idea of releasing giant clouds to loom and glower above our heads just like the real thing. Why they thought that was a good thing I don't know. The fact that the Ministry was being briskly traversed by a crowd of frozen Germans just added "tube station" to its list of strange things resembled. I said, "Is this it, then?"

"What, the German Ministry?" Voldie said. "Well, it couldn't be anywhere else, could it?... Just wait till you see the toilets."

"It's a bit odd."

"It's OLD. All the other ancient sites in Germany got rather bombed, so this one's their pride and joy. It's not that I can't see the point, but I wish they'd turn it into a museum or something... Come on, the archives are this way."

He swept briskly off towards a maze of walkways and galleries and cloister-type things. I dawdled, gazing up at the distant ceiling.

"Hurry up, Harry!"

"It looks like a church."

"It was intentional," he called back, the stillness and silence of the frozen building causing the echoes to multiply astonishingly. "They quite admired Muggle architecture during that period, so they put that extra part in the roof. And the psychedelic stained glass windows. Come _on_, Potts. We do have to save the world."

I squinted up at the stained-glass windows, those that weren't obscured by indoor clouds, anyway. They were glorious purple and green, and hurt my head. I jogged after Voldie and we weaved through the frozen Germans, then crashed into a long line of militant house-elves waving lurid orange placards. These hurt my head a lot more.

"Ha," said Voldie, recovering somewhat from what he evidently considered a bizarre sight. "The _house-elves _are on strike. Well, Harry, are we going to cross a picket line, or not?"

"They're really on strike?" I said, attempting to read their placards. The front row of elves were holding up an understandably long banner that read _Nein am Unsicheremagischea__rbeitsbedingungen_

"Yes, they are. Look, that one's the union rep," said Voldie, pointing at a very fat elf wearing an orange wig and an orange feathery bra. She was sporting a badge that read _Deutsche Elfgewerkschaft_.

"OK. Then, no, we don't."

"Oh. I didn't know you were a socialist."

"I'm not, I don't know anything about politics. I always go by what my uncle thinks."

"What does he think?"

"That socialists should be shot."

"Oh. Yes. _That _uncle... well, I'm inclined to agree with you in principle, but we need to get to the archives."

"Scab!"

"Am not!"

"You are!"

"No, I am not, because at this moment they are _not actually picketing_," he argued persuasively. "At the _moment_, they're not doing _anything_. So..."

"Mmm," I said suspiciously, my opinion of Voldie's moral flexibility in no way diminished. "But there's a picket line. The picket is there."

"Not if they're not picketing," he said smartly. "They have to _be _picketing. If you turn up before they've started, you can cross, and it's all right."

"But they have started."

"They're not doing anything now!" he shouted. "For all intents and purposes they can be regarded as taking their tea break, and will you just bloody well agree with me, it's as if you don't _want _to see the archives!"

I didn't, but I saw his reasoning. "All right."

"Good," he said, and, with a neat stab of his wand, conjured up a very short pair of circus stilts. He mounted these, extended their length to about twenty feet, and began picking his way delicately between the multitude of house-elves.

"What about me?" I shouted up at him, knowing that I wasn't good enough to conjure up stilts and that I wouldn't be able to walk with them if I did.

"_Accio Harry_," he said without even bothering to look up, and I suddenly found myself flying through the green fog like a pin towards a particularly oddly-shaped magnet; and I landed lightly on his bony back, where he casually shouldered me piggy-back and carried on walking.

"That's cheating," I objected.

"You're always moaning," he said.

On the other side of the pickets he shrunk his stilts to nothing and we zoomed back down to the floor. As he set me down and dusted me off, I said, "What are we looking for in the archives?"

"Well," he meditated, playing tunes on his claws again as he strode off down a nearby hallway, "we can't just search for anything that mentions the word Elke. I've tried that before and that bloody gargoyle just laughed at me. This shield, though... there must be something about it. I mean, it obviously smashes the International Statute of Secrecy into a thousand pieces, so the Ministry must have... wait, it's more likely they don't know anything about it, isn't it? Well, surely _someone _must have got suspicious..." but he never got to complete this exposition, because the floor suddenly collapsed in a white yawn of limestone blocks and we went tumbling down towards the floor below. Taken by surprise, I only made a startled jump at a broom that wasn't there; "_Arresto momentum,"_ shouted Voldemort, and we glided gently down the last few metres and came to rest on a pile of stone.

"Hmph," said Voldemort, covered in plaster dust and looking faintly ruffled. "Seems we've taken the scenic route. No wonder the house-elves were protesting about bad working conditions."

"_Tergeo_," I said, sucking most of the dust off our robes with my wand. "Are you all right?"

"Condition: good," came a hollow droning voice from above and behind me, and I jumped and dropped my wand; literally, I mean, because it's amazing how quickly you adapt to a world in which nothing moves or speaks except you and Voldemort. You tend to stop looking out for danger, because there isn't any; so my senses had been put away in moth-balls, and when floors collapsed, or voices came from nowhere, I had to yank them out again.

"He wasn't talking to you," Voldemort snapped, and I turned around to see a brass gargoyle shaped kind of like a boxer dog, which appeared to be grinning smugly on top of its pedestal. As I picked up my wand and cleaned it on my T-shirt, Voldie muttered to me, "Don't ask it any questions, it always answers them wrong just to spite me."

"All right," I said. "What is it?"

"Informational gargoyle No. 20, brass, German Ministry Of – " the gargoyle said promptly.

"I told you!" Voldemort seethed. "I told you! See what I mean?!"

"Ability to see what you mean: negati-"

"SHUT UP!" shouted Voldie.

I contemplated the best line to take in these circumstances, and finally decided on nodding silently so that neither of them could react badly to anything I said. Voldemort glared at the gargoyle and said menacingly, "Is there any dust in your cogs today?"

"Cog status: Dust: present."

"Again?! Again?!"

"Affirmative."

I tugged on Voldie's robes and pointed silently at the gaping ceiling. The vast mahogany bookcases were covered with rubble, and the gargoyle looked distinctly dented.

"Oh, shit," Voldie conceded. "Isn't that just typical? Well, anyway..."

"Typicality status, affirmativ-"

"SHUT UP! SHUT UP!" he bellowed.

Deciding that we were getting nowhere quick, I put in, "We'd like to know about glowing airborne shields."

There was silence from the gargoyle. "That's wasn't a proper question," said Voldie, "and just as well, because he would snigger at you for being too vague. Gargoyle No. 20: information on self-erecting Aethrobex shields, whole of Prussia, circa 1890."

There was a rustling and bonging noise that sounded faintly like the machinery of a grandfather clock, then the gargoyle said distantly, "Define 'circa'."

"Give or take ten years, you infernal machine."

There was more rustling and bonging as the gargoyle's innards chattered to one another. Then it said, "No information."

"Thought not. Now: magicians who worked for Kaiser Wilhelm II."

"What about them?" the gargoyle said smoothly.

"SEARCH FOR THEM!" Voldie screamed.

"No information."

"What have I done to deserve this?" Voldie, demanded, leaping up and down so that little clouds of dust went up and then froze in mid-air. "Mmm, try..."

"Crime occasioning unspecified desserts: unknown."

"SHUT UP!"

I decided this might be a good time to intervene. "Er, Gargoyle No. 20," I said, "is there anything you'd like? You know, a present?"

"What?" said Voldie, looking at me as if I'd said I had an MA in marine biology.

"Present: a gift, something given as – "

"Oh, do it yourself," he snapped to me, and marched off along the gloomy bookshelves in a cloud of dudgeon.

Gargoyle No. 20, meanwhile, thought, rustled and finally bonged, "Oil."

"Erm," I said doubtfully. I could cast the Oleum charm reasonably well, but it was for frying things rather than lubricating machinery. "Whereabouts?"

"Location: back of neck," it said, sounding, I suspected, faintly amused.

The pedestal was six feet tall, but there was a sombre reading room next to the archives, so I Locomotored a very uncomfortable chair through and stood on that. I used Tergeo to suck all the plaster dust and owl droppings out of the gargoyle's insides; then I got on with the oiling, which wasn't really a success at first because I produced far too much oil by accident and had to suck half of it out again because the gargoyle was talking as if it were at the bottom of a swamp. Anyway, at length it pronounced itself happy with its innards and invited me to call it Klaus.

By this time I was impressively knackered. I slid down a nearby filing cabinet with a great sigh and sat on the floor. The floor was really rather smelly, but I couldn't bring myself to care.

"Klaus," I said, "d'you know who it is Voldie's looking for?"

Klaus twanged briefly and said, "Subject: witch, aged at least seventy Gregorian years, employed by Muggle weaponsmiths circa 1942, name: Elke."

"You knew all that and you didn't tell him?" I said, mildly diverted. "And _did _she work for Kaiser Wilhelm?"

"Correction: most likely: Prince Wilhelm."

"Who's that?"

There was no reply. Klaus hummed quietly for a while, then a little gold bubble formed above his head. Inside it floated a grainy black-and-white photo of a middle-aged bloke; he was wearing a remarkable hat, and had a moustache like a mutant W. Overall he bore a striking resemblance to Uncle Vernon, and while I was getting over this unnerving phenomenon Klaus rattled on, "Kaiser Wilhelm II, prior to coronation. Muggle leader, 1859-1941, intrigued by magic and advanced technology, may have offered gold to magicians in exchange for performance of spells. Truth of said rumours: unknown."

I dragged my gaze away from the photo and thought about this. "So he paid her to put up a big shield over Prussia? I don't get it. How come the Muggles didn't notice?"

"Possibly. Unknown. Subject He Who Must Not Be Named referenced self-erecting Aethrobex shield, which would be inactive until needed, therefore may have gone undetected by Muggles and Ministry of Magic."

"Why didn't it pop up for World War II?"

"Unknown."

"Why did Germany lose World War I, for that matter, if they were paying witches to do stuff for them and the British weren't?"

"Unknown. Very little actual magic ever confirmed as having been performed for Muggle governments. Possible reasons: Obliviation and removal of spells by Aurors; contempt for Muggles on the part of magicians; failure of magicians to perform spells correctly, knowing that Muggles would be unable to tell the difference."

"She did _this_ one correctly."

"Undetectable."

"So you knew all this," I said, amused once again, "and you didn't tell Voldie?"

Klaus emitted several pings and cocked its head at me rather curiously. "Status of subject He Who Must Not Be Named: Dark Lord; mass murderer."

"Oh," I said. "Yeah. So he is. Thank you, Klaus," I said, standing up and sucking some more dust out of my clothes. "D'you want anything else?"

"Current condition: satisfactory," Klaus said contentedly, and he sucked the picture of Kaiser Wilhelm back into his pedestal. I was glad about that. It had been giving me the creeps.

I went wandering off through the archives and found Voldemort looking at a book of woodcuts by Dürer in a section labelled _Kunst_, which made me start sniggering all over again. I cackled up to him and his great stack of literature and then stopped dead when I saw he was looking at a horrible picture of dancing skeletons.

"What are you reading about?" I said. "It's hideous."

"Eschatology," he said absently, then added, "the study of the end of the world, since you obviously don't know what that means."

"People _study _the end of the world?"

"Yes," he said, and then, "well!... If you can call it studying, because they don't really have much to say. At a time like this you realise particularly that they're only studying how people _feel _about the end of the world. I mean, it's never happened, and they didn't know when or how it would happen... _we _don't know. _We don't _know when or how it will happen," he corrected himself dolefully. "If we manage to fix this."

"We will fix this," I said firmly.

"Yes. Quite. Anyway, we don't know how the world will end, so there's not much to say on the subject, is there? I mean, the author is discussing plausible threats versus implausible threats; the Black Plague versus the prophecies of Mad Sidney Lovegood, for instance. The problem is that no-one can know for certain which ones really are plausible, and I say this because he's grouped 'Muggle Invasion' with the implausible ones. – Now," he cried, picking up his books and dropping them on the table with a bang, "let's get back to work. What were you giggling about, by the way?"

"Oh. Er. The title of this section."

Blinkage. "What?"

"Y'know... _Kunst_... huh huh..."

He hit me over the head with the Dürer book and told me I had a mental age of twelve, which was probably true, and then I gave him a rather garbled version of everything Klaus had told me and he walked round in little circles tapping his wand against the shelves.

"So," he said, "all we really know is that she _possibly _worked for Prince Wilhelm. Very useful. What are we supposed to do with that? The old loony hired _hundreds _of people to do pseudo-magical claptrap, and I've looked through all the Muggle records; there's nothing. You couldn't very well have expected her to use her real name for them anyway. Now, if the German Aurors _did _investigate her, _that _would be something. They'd still have the records."

"Yeah, but they'd be locked up," I pointed out.

"Locked up by whom?" he said with great triumph, making a grand gesture with one arm so that the sleeve of his robes snapped me in the face.

"Er..."

"Locked up by _all the people who are frozen! _Now's the time to make a move, Potts. You are coming with me, aren't you?"

"Er..."

"It's right off the library, I think," he said excitedly, and went swooping off between the shelves like a humanoid Thestral. I ran after him, hurdling the piles of books and rubble; he was soon way ahead of me and I followed his bare footprints in the plaster dust, and the echoes cackling down between the bookshelves. At last we emerged from the library to face a huge, stern stone frontage, and Voldemort swung round excitedly to face me, nearly getting me again with his wand.

"See this, Potts? Past where the Aurors are? That's where they keep the criminal records. All the investigations, and the reports on my evil deeds. I've never got in it so far, but behold! All the bizzies are frozen! Can't stop me now, can they? _Schnell_, let's find Elke!"

While I was attempting to recover from this he swung round, marched past the frozen German Aurors and started disarming the guard spells, which involved a great amount of flashing and cursing and made the floor shake. Dazzled by the neon lights, with thick black spots chasing one another across my vision, I felt dust hit my head and wondered whether this was really a good idea.

"Voldie," I said as the last rumbles finally died away, "are you sure you can get in here without knocking the buil – "

"_NIHILITHOFICATE!_" he roared, firing off a magnificent ring of rosy lights that made the Grecian columns shudder. "Oh, sorry, Harry. Were you saying something? I think I've just about got it done now. One more..."

"You're going to – " I began, but was once again drowned out by a terrific flash of magic from Voldie's wand; and as soon as the spell was finished he pranced excitedly through the great stone arch. I watched in frustration, and seriously contemplated Stunning or Body-Binding him just to get him to calm down; which was a good thing, because it meant I had my wand out and ready when the trap in the ceiling activated and a thousand steel teeth shot mercilessly down towards Voldemort.

"_Arresto Momentum!" _I yelled , watching in paralysed horror as he threw himself on the floor just in time; he dropped his wand, and groped for it hopelessly, and he tried to push the merciless grate away with his legs, but it was slowly squashing his feet against his shoulders, and it wasn't just a bog-standard spiky thing either because the surface of the metal seemed to be boiling and glittering like mercury. I noticed all this in about half a second and started running around like a cat after a string.

"_Repello Voldie's wand_," I shouted, and sent it clattering towards his hand, but it missed by about six inches. "_Wingardium leviosa_." The grate didn't budge. "_Wingardium leviosa!_"

"It's too powerful," Voldie gasped from the depths of his compressed lungs. "Find the sw – "

"Apparate!" I yelled at him.

"I can't in here. Find the switch."

_What fucking switch?_I thought, running one hand frenziedly over the nearest surface as if I might suddenly find an invisible one. I scanned the stone arch: no switches. For that matter, no levers, no knobs, no whistles and no bells. I slid along the stone like a fridge magnet, trying to fight back rising panic. The switch would be behind the next buttress, I decided. It wasn't. Voldie's eyes, watching mine, were as flat as a lizard's.

"Klaus! Klaus!" I yelled, running back between the bookcases. "Where's the switch that undoes the trap with the spikes on?"

"Define trap with – "

"The one Voldemort's stuck under. How do I undo it?"

Klaus didn't move his face all that much, but the resemblance to a mediaeval gargoyle was suddenly horribly apparent. "Status of subject He Who Must Not Be Named," he said, "Dark Lord; mass murderer."

"Do you know what we're trying to do?" I said, trying to stop my brain exploding out through my eye sockets. "We're trying to stop the nuclear war. You know, that could, like, destroy the planet. The one that's going to kill the Muggles, and the witzies, and destroy this library as well!"

Silence. "War?"

"YES!" I screeched. "Because the Muggles have found a way to harness the strong nuclear force, and they've turned it into weapons that they're going to drop all over Germany, and WE'RE TRYING TO STOP IT!"

Silence again. "Point wand in air and shout password: 'Pilze'."

"PILZE!" I roared, galloping back through the library with my wand aloft. "PILZE! PILZE! PIL... thank fuck," I amended, because in the distance I could hear jangling gears and gently clinking chains, and all the marrow suddenly went out of my bones so that I staggered the last hundred yards like an OWL examiner. I didn't dare look up, in case Voldie hadn't made it; only when I reached the entrance to the Auror department did I force myself to raise my eyes.

Voldie, clearly alive, was leaning against one of the Grecian columns, looking very much like a wobbly little Death by Dürer. His legs, it appeared, were working no better than mine.

"Thanks, Potts," he said feebly. "I didn't think that through very well."

"Let that be a lesson to you to be nice to gargoyles," I said, still stunned. My brain was just starting to acknowledge that had his present body been killed by the Voldie-trap, the stasis spell would presumably have failed and the world would have come to an end. It was not a palatable thought. "I think we'd better go home."

"Well, yes," he conceded, trying and failing to stand unaided; so I propped him up while he pulled himself together, and finally we were almost ready to Apparate and he looked up at the horrible spikes, now hanging docilely near the ceiling once again, and shivered.

"Did I _say _thank you?" he said. "I don't think I did. Thank you, Potter... d'you know what, the thing that got to me most was that I was going to die in that ridiculous position."

As he whisked us off back to Wales, all I could think was, "May the strong force be with you."


End file.
